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A flexible iterative improvement heuristic to support creation of feasible shift rosters in self-rostering

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Abstract

Self-rostering is receiving more and more attention in literature and in practice. With self-rostering, employees propose the schedule they prefer to work during a given planning horizon. However, these schedules often do not match with the staffing demand as specified by the organization. We present an approach to support creating feasible schedules that uses the schedules proposed by the employees as input and that aims to divide the burden of shift reassignments fairly throughout the employees. We discuss computational results and indicate how various model parameters influence scheduling performance indicators. The presented approach is flexible and easily extendable, since labor rule checks are isolated from the actual algorithm, which makes it easy to include additional labor rules in the approach. Moreover, our approach enables the user to make a trade-off between the quality of the resulting roster and the extent to which the planner is able to track the decisions of the algorithm.

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Acknowledgements

This research is supported by the Dutch Technology Foundation STW, applied science division of NWO and the Technology Program of the Ministry of Economic Affairs. The authors thank the anonymous referees for their valuable comments that have helped to improve the paper.

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Correspondence to E. van der Veen.

Appendix

Appendix

1.1 Detailed results

See Tables 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8.

Table 3 Demand randomization—Case Forensic Psychiatry
Table 4 Demand randomization—General Hospital Department 1
Table 5 Demand randomization—General Hospital Department 2
Table 6 Roster randomization—Forensic Psychiatry
Table 7 Roster randomization—Case General Hospital Department 1
Table 8 Roster randomization - General Hospital Department 2

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van der Veen, E., Hurink, J.L., Schutten, J.M.J. et al. A flexible iterative improvement heuristic to support creation of feasible shift rosters in self-rostering. Ann Oper Res 239, 189–206 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-014-1540-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-014-1540-7

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