Workforce Scheduling with Costs and Ergonomic Considerations

In this paper, we develop a workforce scheduling methodology, which takes both financial costs and ergonomic factors such as the avoidance of backward rotations and consecutive night shifts into consideration. First, we obtain relative weights for each complete schedule called a scheme by applying analytic hierarchy process (AHP) under financial costs and ergonomic factors criteria. Next, we formulate an integer program with weights from AHP to select the optimal set of schemes. In addition, we show how the ergonomic aspects of a given set of schemes can be improved via an assignment formulation when the planning horizon repeats itself.