4 ms·
I've used OptaPlanner recently for this kind of scheduling where planning affects both people and things. You don't mention whether your approach is rule-based
by alext0 11y ago
I've used OptaPlanner recently for this kind of scheduling where planning affects both people and things.
You don't mention whether your approach is rule-based or constraint-based. I'd certainly recommend the latter as it allows a bunch of factors to be considered which are really preferences rather than absolute requirements.
It seems that the preferences quoted above (wanting two consecutive days off, minimum rest time etc) are examples of a potentially broad range of factors which typically differ across organisations, or even individuals. They may also change over time or be subject to external events such as a major emergency or building power outage.
Resource planning is a broad and long-established field going back to the dawn of IT. My take is that, while another good planning tool is welcome, the main obstacle is in businesses understanding the problem and what IT can do to help rather than a lack of solutions.
- philip1209 11y agoHey Alex. We treat most of these as hard constraints in our model. Some, such as consecutive days off, we will relax to a soft constraint if it breaks feasibility. Managers have the ability to modify our shifts as they see fit, e.g. to assign shifts that create overtime. Our approach to educating users is to treat our software as "autopilot" - they don't have to understand the complexities of resource planning, timing, etc. For optaplanner specifically - I am not too familiar, but I believe that the scheduling that they do is block-based, whereas ours dynamically adjust shift lengths. This lets us change the coverage hour-by-hour.