Quantitative Approaches on Staff Scheduling and Rostering in Hospitality Management: An Overview
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paper_title: An Annotated Bibliography of Personnel Scheduling and Rostering

paper_content:

Computational methods for rostering and personnel scheduling has been a subject of continued research and commercial interest since the 1950s. This annotated bibliography puts together a comprehensive collection of some 700 references in this area, focusing mainly on algorithms for generating rosters and personnel schedules but also covering related areas such as workforce planning and estimating staffing requirements. We classify these papers according to the type of problem addressed, the application areas covered and the methods used. In addition, a short summary is provided for each paper.
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paper_title: From Service to Experience: Understanding and Defining the Hospitality Business

paper_content:

Failure adequately to define or understand hospitality as a commercial phenomenon has created a fragmented academic environment and a schizophrenia in the industry that has the potential to limit its development as a global industry. This article suggests that, by redefining hospitality as behaviour and experience, a new perspective emerges that has exciting implications for the management of hospitality businesses. A framework to describe hospitality in the commercial domain is proposed. This framework suggests a focus on the host–guest relationship, generosity, theatre and performance, ‘lots of little surprises’, and the security of strangers – a focus that provides guests with experiences that are personal, memorable and add value to their lives.
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paper_title: In search of hospitality : theoretical perspectives and debates

paper_content:

Towards a theoretical understanding (Conrad Lashley, School of Tourism and Hospitality Management, Leeds Metropolitan University) An anthropology of hospitality (Tom Selwyn, The Business School, University of North London) The philosophy of hospitableness (Elizabeth Telfer, University of Glasgow) The hospitality trades: a social history (John K Walton, Dept of Historical and Critical Studies, University of Central Lancashire) Putting up? Gender, hospitality and performance (Jane Darke, School of Planning, Oxford Brookes University and Craig Gurney, Centre for Housing Management and Development, University of Wales) Home and commercialised hospitality ( Paul Lynch, Dept of Business and Consumer Studies, Queen Margaret University College and Doreen MacWhannell, Dept of Management and Social Sciences, Queen Margaret University College) Mediated meanings of hospitality: television personality food programmes (Sandie Randall, Dept of Business and Consumer Studies, Queen Margaret College, Edinburgh) Hospitality and hospitality management (Bob Brotherton, Manchester Metropolitan University and Roy C Wood, Scottish Hotel School, University of Strathclyde) Managing hospitality operations (Andrew Lockwood, School of Management Studies for the Service Sector, University of Surrey, Peter Jones, School of Management Studies for the Service Sector, University of Surrey, J Stephen Taylor, The Scottish Hotel School, University of Strathclyde) Social scientific ways of knowing hospitality (David Botterill, School of Hospitality, Tourism and Leisure, University of Wales Institute, Cardiff) Humour in commercial hospitality settings (Stephen Ball, School of Leisure and Food Management and Keith Johnson, Dept of Hospitality and Tourism Management, Manchester Metropolitan University) Consuming hospitality: learning from post-modernism? (Alistair Williams, Division of Hospitality Management, The University of Huddersfield) Consuming hospitality on holiday (Hazel Andrews, School of Tourism and Hospitality Management, University of North London) Working in hospitality (Yvonne Guerrier and Amel Adib, School of Hotel Management, South Bank University) Education for hospitality (David Airey, School of Management Studies for the Service Sector, University of Surrey and John Tribe, Faculty of leisure and Tourism, Buckingham Chilterns University College)
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paper_title: Key Issues of Concern in the Lodging Industry: What Worries Managers

paper_content:

Human resources management is the most troubling issue of concern to managers and executives in the lodging industry worldwide, according to a survey of 243 managers taken during 2008. The study identified a common set of shared problems that impede the ability of industry leaders to manage effectively, with human resources issues being at the forefront. Over 60 percent of respondents from six different regions of the world in both general manager and executive positions reported that the human resource issues of attraction, retention, training, and morale were key areas of concern. Other problems include economic and environmental matters, understanding customer needs, rising operating costs, and thinking strategically in a competitive environment. The study provides an update to a similar study conducted in 2001. Certain issues identified in that earlier study, including information technology and branding, have dropped from hotel executives’ list of concerns.
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paper_title: Defining the hospitality discipline: a discussion of pedagogical and research implications.

paper_content:

Hospitality is one of the oldest professions and is regarded as a powerful economic activity that touches many aspects of human life. On the other hand, hospitality is a relatively new academic discipline that has no consensus on its scope and exposure. This obvious absence of consensus on the scope of the hospitality field has been a limiting factor in advancing the discipline-specific research agenda and teaching practices that affect this field. In response to this lack of clarity in definition or understanding of the field of hospitality, this article discusses a variety of definitions for hospitality and presents how a variety of researchers have classified hospitality in earlier research. The author argues that the term hospitality is a broad term or a construct, consisting of a diverse group of industries. This situation creates substantial issues in terms of the external validity of empirical studies in the hospitality literature, and raises the question of whether unique and identifiable dimensio...
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paper_title: Towards a definitive view of the nature of hospitality and hospitality management

paper_content:

Explores the issues lying at the very heart of the endeavour academic researchers and industrial practitioners working in the hospitality field are engaged in; the essence of what is referred to as hospitality and its management. It critically reviews the definitions and perspectives on these fundamental issues proffered in the contemporary literature in an attempt to create a clearer view of what “hospitality” and “hospitality management” are. In seeking to achieve this goal the paper questions the fundamental validity of these definitions and perspectives, many of which are frequently accepted as incontestable truths by both academics and practitioners. Finally, the paper presents new definitions for “hospitality” and “hospitality management” which, it argues, should be those adopted to inform and direct the agendas of both academic researchers and industrial practitioners in the new millennium.
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paper_title: Scheduling, Timetabling and Rostering - A Special Relationship?

paper_content:

Computer solution of timetabling, scheduling and rostering problems has been addressed in the literature since the 1950's. Early mathematical formulations proved impossible to solve given the limited computer power of the era. However, heuristics, often very specialised, were used for certain problems from a very early date, although the term heuristic was not generally recognised until later; a few guaranteed optimality, some consistently produced good solutions, but most became unwieldy when adjusted to deal with practical situations. In some cases, weaknesses in the heuristics were overcome by appeal to manual intervention. Mathematical approaches to some problems returned to favour, successfully, around 1980. Some of the subsequent developments of these are very powerful in practical situations, but they are no panacea, and metaheuristics are the flavour of the nineties.
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paper_title: A categorisation of nurse rostering problems

paper_content:

Personnel rostering has received ample attention in recent years. Due to its social and economic relevance and due to its intrinsic complexity, it has become a major subject for scheduling and timetabling researchers. Among the personnel rostering problems, nurse rostering turned out to be particularly complex and difficult. In this paper, we propose a notation for nurse rostering problems along the lines of the ?|β|? notation for scheduling. The system allows extension as well as refinement. It is the aim of the notation to facilitate problem description, classification and systematic study. It enables authors to position the problems in the vaster body of research on the subject. By developing this notation for nurse rostering, we hope that an extension of it will be applicable to a broader domain of personnel rostering.
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paper_title: An Annotated Bibliography of Personnel Scheduling and Rostering

paper_content:

Computational methods for rostering and personnel scheduling has been a subject of continued research and commercial interest since the 1950s. This annotated bibliography puts together a comprehensive collection of some 700 references in this area, focusing mainly on algorithms for generating rosters and personnel schedules but also covering related areas such as workforce planning and estimating staffing requirements. We classify these papers according to the type of problem addressed, the application areas covered and the methods used. In addition, a short summary is provided for each paper.
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paper_title: Telephone call centers: Tutorial, review, and research prospects

paper_content:

Telephone call centers are an integral part of many businesses, and their economic role is significant and growing. They are also fascinating sociotechnical systems in which the behavior of customers and employees is closely intertwined with physical performance measures. In these environments traditional operational models are of great value--and at the same time fundamentally limited--in their ability to characterize system performance.We review the state of research on telephone call centers. We begin with a tutorial on how call centers function and proceed to survey academic research devoted to the management of their operations. We then outline important problems that have not been addressed and identify promising directions for future research.
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paper_title: Heuristic Methods for Automatic Rotating Workforce Scheduling

paper_content:

Rotating workforce scheduling appears in different forms in a broad range of workplaces, such as industrial plants, call centers, public transportation, and airline companies. It is of a high practical relevance to find workforce schedules that fulfill the ergonomic criteria of the employees, and reduce costs for the organization. In this paper we propose new heuristic methods for automatic generation of rotating workforce schedules. To improve the quality of each heuristic method alone, we further propose the hybridization of these methods. The following methods are proposed: (1)A Tabu Search (TS) based algorithm, (2) A heuristic method based on min-conflicts heuristic (MC), (3) A method that includes in the tabu search algorithm the min-conflicts heuristic (TS-MC) and random walk (TS-RW), (4) A method that includes in the min-conflicts heuristic the tabu mechanism (MC-T), random walk (MC-RW), and both the tabu mechanism and the random walk (MC-T-RW). The appropriate neighborhood structure, tabu mechanism, and fitness function, based on the specifics of the problem are proposed. The proposed methods are implemented and experimentally evaluated on the benchmark examples given in the literature and on the real life test problems, which we collected from a broad range of organizations. Empirical results show that the combination of the min-conflicts heuristic with tabu search can be used to solve this problem very effectively. The hybrid methods improve the performance of the commercial system for generation of rotating workforce schedules and are currently in the procees of being included in a commercial package for automatic generation of rotating workforce schedules.
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paper_title: Towards a reference model for timetabling and rostering

paper_content:

Timetabling and rostering research often starts from particular real world problems. The last two decennia have seen a large number of papers discussing cases, models and approaches. This large body of publications does not presently constitute a structured domain that provides guidelines for addressing particular problem instances, nor does it allow identifying gaps where new research is needed.In this paper, we instigate a structured model for timetabling and rostering. We present a basic structure for the integrated staff planning and rostering problem. The model can only result in a valid and efficient tool through the input of multiple disciplines. We give a first formal description for short term nurse rostering. Specific problems are positioned in this model.
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paper_title: Airline Crew Rostering: Problem Types, Modeling, and Optimization

paper_content:

Airline crew rostering is an important part of airline operations and an interesting problem for the application of operations research. The objective is to assign anonymous crew pairings either to personalized rosters or to anonymous bidlines which subsequently will be assigned to individual crew members. Compared to the crew pairing problem, crew rostering has received much less attention in the academic literature and the models presented have been rather simplified. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, we want to give a more comprehensive description of real-world airline crew rostering problems and the mathematical models used to capture the various constraints and objectives found in the airline industry. As this has not been attempted in previous research, we think it serves a purpose to reveal the complexity of real-world crew rostering to readers without industrial knowledge of the problem. Second, we want to present the solution methods employed in a commercial crew rostering system, in whose development we both have been involved. The Carmen Crew Rostering system is currently in use at several major European airlines including British Airways, KLM, Iberia, Alitalia, and Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) as well as at one of the world's largest passenger transportation company Deutsche Bahn (German State Railways). During the development of the Carmen Crew Rostering system, we have gained valuable experience about practical problem solving and we think the system constitutes an interesting case in the application of operations research.
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paper_title: Staff scheduling and rostering: A review of applications, methods and models

paper_content:

Abstract This paper presents a review of staff scheduling and rostering, an area that has become increasingly important as business becomes more service oriented and cost conscious in a global environment. Optimised staff schedules can provide enormous benefits, but require carefully implemented decision support systems if an organisation is to meet customer demands in a cost effective manner while satisfying requirements such as flexible workplace agreements, shift equity, staff preferences, and part-time work. In addition, each industry sector has its own set of issues and must be viewed in its own right. There are many computer software packages for staff scheduling, ranging from spreadsheet implementations of manual processes through to mathematical models using efficient optimal or heuristic algorithms. We do not review software packages in this paper. Rather, we review rostering problems in specific application areas, and the models and algorithms that have been reported in the literature for their solution. We also survey commonly used methods for solving rostering problems.
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paper_title: A comparative evaluation of modeling approaches to the labor shift scheduling problem

paper_content:

Abstract The labor shift scheduling problem has traditionally been formulated using the set covering approach proposed by Dantzig, G.B. [1954. Operations Research 2 (3), 339–341]. The size of the resulting integer model with this approach, however, has been found to be very large to solve optimally in most practical applications. Recently, Bechtold, S.E., Jacobs, L.W. [1990. Management Science 36 (11), 1339–1351] proposed a new integer programming formulation requiring significantly smaller number of variables and nonzeros in the A -matrix than the equivalent set covering formulation. However, due to its assumptions, this approach has remained limited to the special cases of the shift scheduling problem. In Aykin, T. [1996. Management Science 42, 591–603], we presented another implicit modeling approach that is applicable to the general problem without any of the limitations of Bechtold and Jacobs (loc. cit.). This approach also requires substantially smaller number of variables and nonzeros in the A -matrix than the equivalent set covering formulation. In this paper, we relax the assumptions of Bechtold and Jacobs (loc. cit.) and present a generalized version of it. The extended formulation of Bechtold and Jacobs, although requiring smaller number of variables, has more constraints, more nonzeros in the A -matrix, and significantly higher density than the formulation of Aykin (loc. cit.). We compare these modeling approaches through solving (optimally) 220 problems involving as many as 32 928 shift variations. Our computational results show that the time needed to locate an optimal shift schedule and the percentage of the problems solved optimally with Aykin's formulation are substantially better than those with the formulation of Bechtold and Jacobs.
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paper_title: Controlling action times in daily workforce schedules.

paper_content:

Abstract Action times occur when a shift or break starts on finishes. It is found that the number of action times can be reduced or increased substantially without increasing the amount of unproductive staffing. Reducing the number of action times reduces the managerial burden of schedule implementation, while increasing the number of action times allows for more effective real-time schedule control.
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paper_title: Labor Scheduling, Part 2: Knowing How Many On-duty Employees to Schedule

paper_content:

This paper, second in a series, focuses on using forecasts of customer demand for service to estimate the number of employees needed to provide that service. There are three basic approaches to translating demand forecasts into employee requirements: using productivity standards, using service standards, and using economic standards. As described in this paper, the staffing levels determined by using the economic standard provide the best economic performance. The aim of using an economic standard is to deliver the service most economically. Although productivity and service standards can sometimes match the performance of an economic standard, they do so only in narrow ranges of business volume.
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paper_title: An Annotated Bibliography of Personnel Scheduling and Rostering

paper_content:

Computational methods for rostering and personnel scheduling has been a subject of continued research and commercial interest since the 1950s. This annotated bibliography puts together a comprehensive collection of some 700 references in this area, focusing mainly on algorithms for generating rosters and personnel schedules but also covering related areas such as workforce planning and estimating staffing requirements. We classify these papers according to the type of problem addressed, the application areas covered and the methods used. In addition, a short summary is provided for each paper.
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paper_title: Labor Scheduling, Part 4: Controlling Workforce Schedules in Real Time

paper_content:

After forecasting demand, determining staffing levels to meet that demand, and specifying which employees will be needed, a manager must still monitor the day's actual demand to ensure that the wor...
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paper_title: Scheduling Restaurant Workers to Minimize Labor Cost and Meet Service Standards

paper_content:

In labor scheduling, restaurant managers face dual challenges: overstaffing that means excessive labor costs and understaffing that invites the opportunity cost of service errors and lost business. Most operators seek to rely on their personal experience and judgment to determine schedules that are meant to maintain service quality and limit labor costs, but an analysis of one Korean restaurant finds that this goal is elusive. The labor scheduling model based on integer programming (IP) is presented to address the staffing and scheduling issues and service standards by maintaining an appropriate ratio of part-time to full-time employees. Using appropriate constraints, the model was used to generate a schedule for a table service restaurant in Seoul, South Korea, that is affiliated with a global chain. When compared to the existing schedule, the IP-generated schedule helped the restaurant reduce overall labor costs while ensuring appropriate service levels.
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paper_title: Scheduling Nursing Personnel According to Nursing Preference: A Mathematical Programming Approach

paper_content:

This paper describes a nurse scheduling system, the heart of which poses the scheduling decision as a large multiple-choice programming problem whose objective function quantifies preferences of individual nursing personnel concerning length of work stretch, rotation patterns, and requests for days off. The constraints provide for minimum numbers of nursing personnel of each skill class to be assigned to each day and shift of a four-or six-week scheduling period. The problem is solved by a modification of Balintfy and Blackburn's algorithm for multiple-choice programming problems. We include a description of the implementation of the scheduling system on nursing units of several hospitals.
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paper_title: Labor Scheduling, Part 1: Forecasting Demand

paper_content:

This paper focuses on forecasting demand for services, the first of a four-part series on developing effective workforce schedules. Serving customers well, at a reasonable cost, requires the proper number and mix of employees. Scheduling too many employees means high labor costs, while scheduling too few workers can mean poor service that drives away business. Forecasting customer demand involves eight steps: determine the nature of the work, identify those factors that generate the work (i.e., the labor drivers), determine whether the labor drivers are time variant or time invariant, determine the time interval for tracking the time-variant labor drivers, forecast the time-variant labor drivers, smooth those forecasts, track the error in those forecasts, and define the allowable window for controllable work. Balancing employees' skills and availability, plus governmental regulations, company policies, and contractual obligations regarding work schedules, can be a manager's nightmare.
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paper_title: Scheduler – A System for Staff Planning

paper_content:

Scheduling of staff is an important area, both from an academic and industrial point of view. There has been a lot of attention to develop new and efficient methods and models. In this paper, we consider the problem that given a work-force demand, a set of working rules and regulations find schedules for staff members with individual skills and preferences. The planning horizon is typically one week to several months. The problem both constructs tasks and simultaneously allocates them to staff members. The purpose of this paper is not to develop new theoretical results. Instead it deals with novel applications of known approaches to real-world practice. We describe a general scheduling software called SCHEDULER that includes a number of important features. The model is based on a elastic set-partitioning model and as solution method we use a branch-and-price algorithm. As branching strategy we make use of constraint branching and the column generator is a nested constrained shortest path formulation. An important feature is that only legal schedules are generated and used within the model. The system also allows for task changes within shifts, a general description of legal restrictions, preferences and allowable times. The system is in use at a number of companies and we report on the usage at some companies. We also give some numerical results to illustrate the behavior of some important features.
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paper_title: Exploiting problem structure in a genetic algorithm approach to a nurse rostering problem

paper_content:

There is considerable interest in the use of genetic algorithms to solve problems arising in the areas of scheduling and timetabling. However, the classical genetic algorithm paradigm is not well equipped to handle the conflict between objectives and constraints that typically occurs in such problems. In order to overcome this, successful implementations frequently make use of problem specific knowledge. This paper is concerned with the development of a GA for a nurse rostering problem at a major UK hospital. The structure of the constraints is used as the basis for a co-evolutionary strategy using co-operating sub-populations. Problem specific knowledge is also used to define a system of incentives and disincentives, and a complementary mutation operator. Empirical results based on 52 weeks of live data show how these features are able to improve an unsuccessful canonical GA to the point where it is able to provide a practical solution to the problem.
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paper_title: Survey, Categorization, and Comparison of Recent Tour Scheduling Literature

paper_content:

The employee tour scheduling problem involves the determination of both work hours of the day and workdays of the week for each employee. This problem has proven difficult to solve optimally due to its large size and pure integer nature. During the last decade, numerous approaches for modeling and solving this problem have been proposed. In this paper, employee tour scheduling literature published since 1990 is reviewed and classified. Solution techniques are classified into ten categories: (1) manual solution, (2) integer programming, (3) implicit modeling, (4) decomposition, (5) goal programming, (6) working set generation, (7) LP-based solution, (8) construction and improvement, (9) metaheuristics, and (10) other methods. The objective is to identify broad classifications, present typical mathematical models, compare the different methods, and identify future research directions.
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paper_title: Modeling staff scheduling problems. A tutorial

paper_content:

Abstract This tutorial gives an introduction to staff scheduling problems. It is meant to be especially accessible for non-initiated people to help them with the analysis and modeling of staff scheduling problems.
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paper_title: Cost analysis of alternative formulations for personnel scheduling in continuously operating organizations

paper_content:

Personnel-scheduling problems for continuously operating organizations have proven to be difficult to solve optimally. As a consequence, a number of alternative approaches have been devised for solving these problems. We provide computational results of a study of the staffing costs obtained using a prominent alternative formulation approach. The results demonstrate that excess staffing costs may result from the use of this approach. We subsequently develop a new local-search heuristic based on the simulated annealing algorithm to generate feasible integer personnel schedules in continuously operating organizations. The solution costs and computational effort associated with the new heuristic are shown to be generally superior to those of branch-and-bound integer programming.
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paper_title: A Stochastic Goal Program for Employee Scheduling

paper_content:

Deterministic goal programs for employee scheduling decisions attempt to minimize expected operating costs by assigning the ideal number of employees to each feasible schedule. For each period in the planning horizon, managers must first determine the amount of labor that should be scheduled for duty. These requirements are often established with marginal analysis techniques, which use estimates for incremental labor costs and shortage expenses. Typically, each period in the planning horizon is evaluated as an independent epoch. An implicit assumption is that individual employees can be assigned to schedules with as little as a single period of work. If this assumption violates local work rules, the labor requirements parameters for the deterministic goal program may be suboptimal. ::: ::: ::: ::: As we show in this research, this well-known limitation can lead to costly staffing and scheduling errors. We propose an employee scheduling model that overcomes this limitation by integrating the labor requirements and scheduling decisions. Instead of a single, externally determined staffing goal for each period, the model uses a probability distribution for the quantity of labor required. The model is free to choose an appropriate staffing level for each period, eliminating the need for a separate goal-setting procedure. In most cases this results in better, less costly decisions. In addition, the proposed model easily accommodates both linear and nonlinear under- and overstaffing penalties. We use simple examples to demonstrate many of these advantages and to illustrate the key techniques necessary to implement our model. We also assess its performance in a study of more than 1,700 simulated stochastic employee scheduling problems.
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paper_title: A Comparison of Heuristics for Assigning Individual Employees to Labor Tour Schedules

paper_content:

The labor tour scheduling literature has focused on the development of schedules, and with a few exceptions, employees were assumed to have identical cost and productivity. Even the few exceptions in the literature that solved tour problems considered employees within a work group to have identical cost and productivity. In this paper we evaluated heuristics for assigning individual employees – who differed in cost and productivity – to labor tour schedules. Our results showed that considering productivity levels when assigning individuals to tours increased profitability. We found that a simple managerial heuristic of assigning individuals in descending order of their productivity to cost ratio was both fast and effective over a broad range of service environmental scenarios. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2004
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paper_title: An Implicit Tour Scheduling Model with Applications in Healthcare

paper_content:

Motivated by difficult staff scheduling problems arising in healthcare institutions, we have developed an implicit tour scheduling model which includes full and part-time tour types as well as intra-tour start time flexibility. Potential benefits of intra-tour start time flexibility are demonstrated through a computational experiment. The model has been embedded in a decision support system at a large tertiary care hospital and has been used in numerous studies to help estimate staffing needs and to analyze the impact of scheduling policies and practices.
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paper_title: Overlapping start-time bands in implicit tour scheduling

paper_content:

Many organizations face personnel scheduling decisions under conditions of variable demand for service across a seven-day planning horizon. These organizations must assign employees to daily shifts that efficiently satisfy the demand for labor, yet allow adequate time for rest between subsequent shifts of an employee's weekly tour schedule. To meet these diverse objectives, managers may permit shifts to begin and end in any planning period of the day, but place bands on shift-start times to which individuals may be assigned on each day of their tour schedule. ::: ::: We present a compact integer programming model that implicitly represents start-time band scheduling flexibility. We demonstrate the new model by applying it to requirements for toll collectors on the Illinois Tollway. Problems requiring up to two million variables using a general set covering formulation were represented using the new implicit programming model and often solved to optimality in just a few minutes on a Pentium-based microcomputer. The results indicate that start-time bands can provide an important improvement in scheduling efficiency when compared to the exclusive use of schedules that require workers to begin work on the same hour of the day on each day of their tour.
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paper_title: A sequential integer programming method for discontinuous labor tour scheduling

paper_content:

Abstract General set-covering formulations (GSCFs) of labor tour scheduling problems have recently received substantial attention in the research literature. The most successful heuristic approaches to these problems have used the linear programming (LP) solution to the GSCF as a starting point and subsequently applied heuristic augmentation and improvement procedures to obtain feasible integer solutions. Integer programming (IP) methods eliminate the need for augmentation and improvement procedures, but have generally been considered intractable for large GSCFs. In this paper we present a sequential mixed-integer programming (SMIP) heuristic for discontinuous (
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paper_title: Scheduling workforce relief breaks in advance versus in real-time

paper_content:

Abstract This paper focuses upon employee rest breaks, or reliefs, in workforce scheduling. Historically, the workforce scheduling literature has largely ignored reliefs, as less than 18% of the 64 papers we surveyed scheduled reliefs. The argument has been that one need not schedule reliefs in advance, since they can easily be scheduled in real-time. We find this argument to be flawed. We show that failing to schedule reliefs in advance will have one of two undesirable outcomes. First, there will be a less profitable deployment of labor should all reliefs actually be taken in real-time. Second, if some reliefs are never assigned or if relief-timing restrictions are relaxed so that more reliefs may be assigned in real-time, there will be a disgruntled and less productive workforce and perhaps violations of contractual obligations. Our findings are supported by anecdotal evidence drawn from commercial labor scheduling software.
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paper_title: Personnel Tour Scheduling When Starting-Time Restrictions Are Present

paper_content:

This paper presents an effective solution strategy for an important category of personnel scheduling problems. Specifically, we address the restricted starting-time tour-scheduling problem (RSTP), which involves the determination of the hours of the day (shifts) and days of the week (days on) that employees are assigned to work. RSTP is characterized by restrictions on the number of daily time periods in which employees may begin their shifts. Moreover, the RSTP we consider contains constraints that require separation of starting times. Such restrictions are widely encountered in practice and are based on a number of factors including managerial concerns for control of employee movements, union contractual obligations, and employee preferences for common shift starting times. A two-stage heuristic solution strategy is proposed for RSTP. We developed eight heuristic procedures based on this strategy and applied them to four sets of labor requirements, for each of 27 United Airlines (UA) airport ground stations. One of the best of these procedures yielded solution costs that averaged only 1.36 full-time-equivalent employees above very conservative LP-based lower bounds. Moreover, the solution costs obtained using this procedure were, on average, 28 percent closer to the lower bounds than solution costs obtained using UA's current scheduling system. We conclude that the two-stage heuristic solution strategy is a valuable platform from which to develop procedures for generating near-optimal solutions to this difficult class of personnel scheduling problems.
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paper_title: Scheduler – A System for Staff Planning

paper_content:

Scheduling of staff is an important area, both from an academic and industrial point of view. There has been a lot of attention to develop new and efficient methods and models. In this paper, we consider the problem that given a work-force demand, a set of working rules and regulations find schedules for staff members with individual skills and preferences. The planning horizon is typically one week to several months. The problem both constructs tasks and simultaneously allocates them to staff members. The purpose of this paper is not to develop new theoretical results. Instead it deals with novel applications of known approaches to real-world practice. We describe a general scheduling software called SCHEDULER that includes a number of important features. The model is based on a elastic set-partitioning model and as solution method we use a branch-and-price algorithm. As branching strategy we make use of constraint branching and the column generator is a nested constrained shortest path formulation. An important feature is that only legal schedules are generated and used within the model. The system also allows for task changes within shifts, a general description of legal restrictions, preferences and allowable times. The system is in use at a number of companies and we report on the usage at some companies. We also give some numerical results to illustrate the behavior of some important features.
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paper_title: Monthly tour scheduling models with mixed skills considering weekend off requirements

paper_content:

Unlike manufacturing, where standard shifts and days off are the rule, the service industry operates every day of the week across a month and a year. To maintain the morale and productivity of the workers in the service industry, the weekend off requirements, one of the important work preferences for the workers, should be respected and balanced for a longer planning horizon beyond a week. This paper deals with the monthly tour scheduling problem with mixed skills considering the weekend off requirements in contrast to the weekly planning horizon that is typical in most literature. The objective is to obtain the most economical mix of types of workers satisfying the patterns of demands for the workers and desired work characteristics. Two model formulations are developed based on implicit programming techniques. One model uses a general integer programming (GIP) formulation and assigns the lunch break hours aggregately to the workers based on the worker types. The other one adopts a binary integer programming (BIP) formulation and assigns the lunch break hours explicitly to the individual workers. The effectiveness of the two models is illustrated by the numerical tests and the results show that the BIP formulation is more efficient than the GIP formulation.
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paper_title: Nurse rostering problems - a bibliographic survey

paper_content:

Abstract Hospitals need to repeatedly produce duty rosters for its nursing staff. The good scheduling of nurses has impact on the quality of health care, the recruitment of nurses, the development of budgets and other nursing functions. The nurse rostering problem (NRP) has been the subject of much study. This paper presents a brief overview, in the form of a bibliographic survey, of the many models and methodologies available to solve the NRP.
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Title: Quantitative Approaches on Staff Scheduling and Rostering in Hospitality Management: An Overview

Section 1: Introduction
Description 1: This section introduces the context and importance of hospitality management and highlights the complexity and significance of human resource management in this sector.

Section 2: The Problem
Description 2: This section defines scheduling and rostering, discusses their importance, and outlines the unique challenges faced in the service industry, particularly in hospitality management.

Section 3: Staff Scheduling and Rostering in Hospitality Management
Description 3: This section explores the specific characteristics and challenges of staff scheduling and rostering within the hospitality sector, comparing these with other service industries like healthcare.

Section 4: Possible Solution Approaches for Staff Scheduling and Rostering Problems in Hospitality Management
Description 4: This section reviews various quantitative methods and models, including optimization techniques and heuristics, that can be applied to solve staff scheduling and rostering problems in hospitality management.

Section 5: Concluding Remarks
Description 5: This section summarizes the paper's findings, reflecting on the importance of addressing staff scheduling and rostering in hospitality management and suggesting potential future research directions.