A real-world workforce scheduling problem in the hospitality industry: theoretical models and algorithmic methods

This work-in-progress concerns the investigation of a real-world problem of scheduling catering and house keeping workforce in the hospitality industry. The corresponding author of this paper has been involved in a consultancy project with the problem owner for the past 8 months. The application problem described in this paper belongs to the category of problems known to operations research specialists as personnel (or manpower, workforce, staff) scheduling (or planning, timetabling, rostering). Personnel scheduling is concerned with the determination of appropriate workforce requirements, workforce allocation and workforce duty assignments for an organisation in order to meet internal and external requirements. This involves the allocation of human resources to timeslots and possible locations. This problem is often extremely difficult to solve [11, 6]. Providing the right people at the right time at the right cost whilst achieving a high level of employee satisfaction is a critical problem for organisations [6]. Not surprisingly, personnel scheduling has been the subject of much investigation in the literature over the past 30 years with a survey in every decade [1, 10, 3, 2, 6]. Different applications of this problem have been presented in the literature. We can distinguish between general and specific applications. The terms workforce (or manpower, labour, staff or personnel) scheduling (or rostering, timetabling) are often used interchangeably to refer to the general problem. The remainder of this chapter is structured as follows. In section 2 we describe our worksforce scheduling problem. Section 3 gives a theoretical model of the problem and section 4 seeks to solve the problem by heuristic means.