A simple method for obtaining cyclic employee schedules

This paper describes newly developed and greatly simplified methods for obtaining cyclic employee tour schedules. Procedures for obtaining an intial solution, improvement methods, and conditions for optimality are given and illustrated for the general problem of minimizing the number of tours of p consecutive periods each to cover a set of cyclic requirements for n periods per cycle. Particular attention is given to the problems of developing optimal schedules for 8 hours tours per cycle of 24 hours.