Planning Shift Work and Duty Roster for Personnel with Variable Workload

Abstract

Transport companies such as bus, rail and airlines, airports, hospitals, supermarket check-outs are all subject to considerable fluctuations in their daily personnel requirements. In some areas daily fluctuations are superseded by weekly and seasonal requirements. The basic activities creating the requirements are services in terms of time which normally cannot be influenced and easily reproduced. The daily requirement frequently goes over more than 8 hours from Monday to Sunday, which makes the operation of a shift system essential. The initial data for the requirement planning can be deterministic (bus, rail or plane timetables) or stochastic (the arrival of passengers at check-ins, occupation of hospital beds, consumer behaviour).

In planning personnel requirements with variable workloads, three problems have to be solved: calculation of workload profiles per day, shift planning (begin, duration, strength of shifts), rota planning. In this paper two different solution concepts are compared: (1) The three problem areas are integrated within one model (set partitioning or set covering models). (2) The three problems are handled step by step by using several procedures and models (waiting line- or sequence-models; LP, heuristics). Especially the rota planning procedure is described.