A two-stage solution approach for personalized multi-department multi-day shift scheduling

Abstract In this paper, we address a personalized multi-department multi-day shift scheduling problem with a multi-skill heterogeneous workforce where employees can be transferred between departments under some restrictions. The objective is to construct a schedule that minimizes under-coverage, over-coverage, transfer and labor costs. We propose a novel two-stage approach to solve it: the first stage considers an approximate and smaller problem based on data aggregation and produces approximate transfers. The second stage constructs personalized schedules based on the information deduced from the first stage. An exhaustive experimental study is conducted and proves the efficiency of the proposed approach in terms of solution quality and computing times.