Shift Scheduling of Short Time Workers in Large-Scale Home Improvement Center by using Cooperative Evolution

There are a lot of large-scale Home Improvement Center (HIC) in Japan. In the large-scale HIC, about hundred short time workers are registered. And about forty workers are working every day. A manager creates a monthly shift schedule. The manager selects the workers required for each working day, assigns the working time and break time for each worker and also work placement. Because there are many requirements for the scheduling, the scheduling consumes time costs and efforts. Therefore, we propose the technique to create and optimize the schedule of the short time workers in order to reduce the burden of the manager. A cooperative evolution is applied for generating and optimizing the shift schedule of short time worker. Several problems has been found in carrying out this research. This paper proposes techniques to automatically create and optimize the shift schedule of workers in large-scale HIC by using a Cooperative Evolution (CE), to solve the situation that many workers concentrate in a specific time zone, and to solve the situation where many breaks are concentrated in a specific break time zone, and an effective mutation operators.