An integer linear programming-based heuristic for scheduling heterogeneous, part-time service employees

Scheduling of heterogeneous, part-time, service employees with limited availability is especially challenging because employees have different availability and skills, and work different total work hours in a planning period, e.g., a week. The constraints typically are to meet employee requirements during each hour in a planning period with shifts which have a minimum & maximum length, and do not exceed 5 work days per week for each employee. The objectives typically are to minimize over staffing and to meet the target total work hours for each employee during the planning period. We decompose this problem into (a) determining good shifts and then (b) assigning the good shifts to employees, and use a set of small integer linear programs to solve each part. We apply this method to the data given in a reference paper and compare our results. Also, several random problems are generated and solved to verify the robustness of our solution method. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.