Towards a practical engineering tool for rostering

Abstract

The profitability and morale of many organizations (such as factories, hospitals and airlines) are affected by their ability to schedule their personnel properly. Sophisticated and powerful constraint solvers such as ILOG, CHIP, ECLiPSe, etc. have been demonstrated to be extremely effective on scheduling. Unfortunately, they require non-trivial expertise to use. This paper describes ZDC-Rostering, a constraintbased tool for personnel scheduling that addresses the software crisis and fills a void in the space of solvers. ZDC-Rostering is easier to use than the above constraint-based solvers and more effective than Microsoft's Excel Solver. ZDC-Rostering is based on an open-source computer-aided constraint programming package called ZDC, which decouples problem formulation (or modelling) from solution generation in constraint satisfaction. ZDC is equipped with a set of constraint algorithms, including Extended Guided Local Search, whose efficiency and effectiveness have been demonstrated in a wide range of applications. Our experiments show that ZDC-Rostering is capable of solving realistic-sized and very tightly-constrained problems efficiently. ZDC-Rostering demonstrates the feasibility of applying constraint satisfaction techniques to solving rostering problems, without having to acquire deep knowledge in constraint technology. ZDC-Rostering

Heuristic optimization for software project management with impacts of team efficiency

“…Precedence constraints are studied in constrained scheduling and optimization [19]. This paper only studies the type of "Finish to Start" dependence.…”

An Aircraft Service Staff Rostering Using a Hybrid GRASP Algorithm

“…Staff rostering is an essential issue in many companies across different industries. To fully utilize staff members and to enhance profitability of a company, the ability to generate an effective roster is important (Tsang et al, 2007). Rostering, defined by Belew et al, (1992), is a process to arrange the employees to working hours which fulfill some constraints for a preset period of time, typically weekly or monthly.…”