Practical recommendations for staff rostering justified by real-world optimization

Abstract

Staff rostering is a difficult and time-consuming problem that every company or institution that has employees working on shifts or on irregular working days must solve. The main goal is the performance of staff on financial efficiency. Other important goals include fairer workloads and employee satisfaction. Furthermore, the staff rostering optimization should address the health, safety, and well-being of the employees. The Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, which operates under the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, published their latest recommendations for shift work in 2019. The recommended values for more than ten individual factors are well justified. However, problems arise when all these recommendations should be satisfied together in real-world staff rostering. We show the gap between the ideal recommendations, theoretical expectations and the everyday reality. We publish our five most important practical recommendations for shift work that researchers should consider when they implement staff rostering algorithms. The PEASTP metaheuristic is used for optimization test runs.