Staff assignment with lexicographically ordered acceptance levels

Abstract

Staff assignment is a compelling exercise that affects most companies and organizations in the service industries. Here, we introduce a new real-world staff assignment problem that was reported to us by a Swiss provider of commercial employee scheduling software. The problem consists of assigning employees to work shifts subject to a large variety of critical and noncritical requests, including employees' personal preferences. Each request has a target value, and deviations from the target value are associated with integer acceptance levels. These acceptance levels reflect the relative severity of possible deviations, e.g., for the request of an employee to have at least two weekends off, having one weekend off is preferable to having no weekend off and thus receives a higher acceptance level. The objective is to minimize the total number of deviations in lexicographical order of the acceptance levels. Staff assignment approaches from the literature are not applicable to this problem. We provide a binary linear programming formulation and propose a matheuristic for large-scale instances. The matheuristic employs effective strategies to determine the subproblems and focuses on finding good feasible solutions to the subproblems rather than proving their optimality. Our computational analysis based on real-world data shows that the matheuristic scales well and outperforms commercial employee scheduling software.

Achieving compromise solutions in nurse rostering by using automatically estimated acceptance thresholds

“…Tackling these critical issues is necessary for a posteriori methods to be beneficial in practice. Rihm and Baumann (2018) introduce a new formulation for employee scheduling problems, namely the staff assignment problem with lexicographically ordered acceptance levels (SAP-LAL).…”

“…For example, an acceptance level of 100 for the first violation (meaning that it is fully acceptable), a level of 60 for the second violation, and a level of 0 for three or more violations (making those solutions infeasible). After setting these acceptance levels, Rihm and Baumann (2018) solve the problem lexicographically by minimizing violations based on increasing order of the acceptance levels, to ensure that the solution does not consider a trade-off between constraint violations of different severity. Although this method resembles the method we introduce (especially in the terms that are used), we will highlight significant differences in Section 4.…”

Preface

“…The authors apply a three-step methodology, resulting in the formulation of managerial guidelines for hiring and overtime policy. "Staff assignment with lexicographically ordered acceptance levels" (Rihm and Baumann 2017) introduces a real-world staff assignment problem, where current approaches from the scientific literature are not suitable. The matheuristic that is utilised scales well and outperforms commercial employee scheduling software.…”