Personnel preferences in personnel planning and scheduling

Abstract

The personnel of an organization often has seemingly conflicting goals. On the one hand, the common goal is to achieve operational efficiency and to be available for work when needed in the organization. On the other hand, individual employees like to have a good work-life balance, by having personal working hour preferences taken into account. We develop and apply Operations Research methods and tools and show that operational efficiency can be achieved while taking personnel preferences into account. We address various personnel planning and scheduling decisions, including staffing under annualized hours, shift scheduling, days off scheduling, weekend shift rostering, and self-scheduling. For this, we develop a range of mathematical optimization methods, such as mathematical programming, Cross-Entropy optimization, Branch-and-Price, and heuristic optimization. The most important remaining challenge in personnel planning and scheduling lies with implementing optimization algorithms in practice. We have taken some first steps in this direction: our results are based on real life studies and applications. The algorithm designs explicitly take into account their applicability in day-to-day personnel scheduling. We believe that this aspect, combined with the incorporation of employee specific preferences, will be instrumental in the implementation success of personnel planning and scheduling algorithms.