Workforce planning: From sales to schedules

Caroline Jagtenberg, Gerhard Post

Research output: Chapter in Book / Report / Conference proceedingConference contributionAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

We present a comprehensive workforce planning approach from both a functional and technical perspective. Our approach forecasts the demand for staff in the future and schedules the employees accordingly. We give a high level overview of the complete planning process, which is decomposed in several steps. Two crucial optimization steps are discussed in more detail: first, we analyze the set of employees and the flexibility in their contract hours. Their individual weekly workload is optimized to match the varying demand. This step can be viewed as capacity planning, and is done using linear programming. The second step we discuss in detail is how we design and assign shifts to staff according to elaborate shift structure rules. To this end we use variable neighborhood search. Our entire planning is done on a detailed level of 15-minute intervals. The method was commercially implemented and is currently used in practice. We finish with our ideas for extending this work.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationPATAT 2016 - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling
EditorsEdmund K. Burke, Luca Di Gaspero, Ender Ozcan, Barry McCollum, Andrea Schaerf
PublisherPATAT
Pages493-498
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9780992998417
Publication statusPublished - 2016
Event11th International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling, PATAT 2016 - Udine, Italy
Duration: 23 Aug 201626 Aug 2016

Publication series

NamePATAT 2016 - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling

Conference

Conference11th International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling, PATAT 2016
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityUdine
Period23/08/1626/08/16

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© PATAT 2016.All rights reserved.

Copyright:
Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

Keywords

  • Shift design
  • Shift scheduling
  • Workforce capacity allocation
  • Workload modeling

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