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Operations Research Proceedings 2018 pp 445–451Cite as

Real-World Staff Rostering via Branch-and-Price in a Declarative Framework

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Abstract

An important problem in staff scheduling is roster generation. The task is to find an assignment of shifts to employees, such that qualification restrictions and demands are met as well as possible. This assignment problem is in particular challenging due to business rules concerning working time, day on/off patterns, rest times, or employee preferences. The present paper outlines INFORM’s staff rostering optimizer that is used to solve large-scale real-world rostering instances, and evaluates the performance of the optimizer on nurse rostering data. Moreover, we describe how we integrate the optimizer into our system and adapt it to the needs of our customers using a declarative programming framework.

Keywords

  • Staff scheduling
  • Roster generation
  • Branch-and-price
  • Datalog

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  • DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-18500-8_55
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Authors and Affiliations

  1. INFORM GmbH, Workforce Management Division, Aachen, Germany

    Marco Bender, Sebastian Berckey, Michael Elberfeld & Jörg Herbers

Authors
  1. Marco Bender
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  2. Sebastian Berckey
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  3. Michael Elberfeld
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  4. Jörg Herbers
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marco Bender .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

    Prof. Bernard Fortz

  2. Department of Computer Science, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

    Prof. Martine Labbé

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Bender, M., Berckey, S., Elberfeld, M., Herbers, J. (2019). Real-World Staff Rostering via Branch-and-Price in a Declarative Framework. In: Fortz, B., Labbé, M. (eds) Operations Research Proceedings 2018. Operations Research Proceedings. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18500-8_55

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