A Constraint Programming Application for Rotating Workforce Scheduling

We describe CP-Rota, a new constraint programming application for rotating workforce scheduling that is currently being developed at our institute to solve real-life problems from industry. It is intended to complement FCS, a previously developed application. The advantages of CP-Rota over FCS are a significantly smaller and more maintainable code base, portability across a range of different language implementations and a more declarative approach that makes extensions easier and mistakes less likely. Our benchmarks show that CP-Rota is already competitive with FCS and even outperforms it on several hard real-life instances from the literature.