Optimization methods for complex personnel shift scheduling problems

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Kronos Canadian Systems Inc. commercializes the Workforce Scheduler software to more than 1,100 organizations across the world, including 107 in Canada. This software allows to determine the work schedules of employees in various domains including retail, healthcare, leisure and hospitality, and manufacturing. Personnel shift scheduling is a complex optimization problem that involves determining for each available employee his working days, the exact shift to work on each working day, and the job(s) to perform in each shift, in order to cover at best the demand in employees for each job. At Kronos, the current optimization algorithm aims at solving a planning version of the personnel scheduling problem. In this project, we propose to enhance its capabilities and to explore alternative algorithms for solving complex versions of the personnel scheduling problem, namely, rescheduling that requires revising planned schedules when unforeseen event occur, robust scheduling that takes into account demand variation and potential employee absenteeism, and multi-department/multi-site scheduling that considers possible employee transfers between departments or between sites. Our main objective is to develop an efficient algorithm for solving practical instances of each of these problem variants. To do so, we will perform mathematical modeling, data analysis, and methodological developments.