Work Distribution for a Heterogeneous Library Staff : A Personnel Task Scheduling Problem

Abstract: The distribution of tasks to a heterogeneous work force at libraries and other service institutions is a time consuming task for manual schedulers. In this thesis, we study the possibility of making the assignment using operations research techniques. The problem studied concerns seven days per week, five types of tasks, two types of staff qualifications and around 100 tasks per week to be assigned to the staff. Staff member satisfaction is also taken into account in the scheduling process. The main objective is to create an optimal ten week rotating schedule, in which the stand-in staff members are evenly distributed. Such a schedule is considered to be robust, since stand-in staff can replace the regular staff when there is unforseen absence. A mathematical model is formulated for the problem and is solved using the commercial solver CPLEX. We also present two different large neighbourhood search heuristic implementations for this problem. The first heuristic assigns complete week blocks to the staff members, while the second one distributes one task at a time. The latter heuristic works better than the former and achieves results comparable to those of the commercial solver. Our conclusion is that the second heuristic works better because it focuses on finding a good weekend distribution before creating the rest of the schedule. A conclusion from our work is that the weekend-worker constellation is the most significant degree of freedom in the problem.