Development of the new business intelligent employee scheduling solution in complex service operations

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GaiaDigits focus on Workforce Management Solution in retail, manufacturing, hospitality, and other modern services. This research seeks to develop mathematical programming models and algorithms based on robust optimization for work force scheduling systems for service industry in collaboration with GaiaDigits. Workforce scheduling is a very important operational component within the service industry, e.g., restaurant, retail. There are difficulties in designing workforce scheduling systems in service industry. First, the problem scale could be quite large due to the workforce size and planning horizon length. Second, the uncertainties in the workforce scheduling systems could be large. These uncertainties include demand uncertainty and staff uncertainty. Demand uncertainty refers to the variable service hours that should be provided by the staff. Staff uncertainty refers to the variable service hours that could be provided by the staff. The available staff service hours could be volatile due to changing schedules, absence, etc. In this program, we will use the robust optimization approach to design the workforce scheduling systems. The robust optimization approach, can use historical data to construct an uncertainty set to demonstrate uncertainties, while is more computationally efficient than stochastic program. The objectives of this research include: 1) developing a robust optimization based solution methodology for workforce scheduling; 2) developing a software prototype for this methodology. Once this project is finished, we can bring a better and more effective Employee Schedule tool to the service industry.