Evaluation of Employee Rosters with the Extended Linear Numberings Method

In this paper we introduce the extended linear numberings method for evaluating the quality of employees’ rosters. The extension to the original linear numberings method was necessary to cover a wider range of constraints from various employee rostering problems. We created an XML format for the constraints such that any new real world constraint is fit for the evaluation procedure by only expressing it in the XML format. We have tested the approach on real employee rostering data where the evaluation procedure was called from a meta-heuristic procedure. The main advantages of the proposed approach are the fast evaluation of constraints and the simple extendibility of the model with extra constraints.