Scheduling IT Staff at a Bank: A Mathematical Programming Approach

1. Introduction

Scheduling of staff or personnel is applicable in a wide variety of areas and service delivery fields such as scheduling of medical personnel in hospitals, scheduling of airline and hotel personnel, and scheduling of patrol officers. A good schedule balances the needs of employees or customers and the tasks involved, and schedules can be created for various periods of time such as days, weeks, or months. Depending on the complexity of the schedule, some organizations can use scheduling software such as spread sheets software to complete the task. One thing to note regarding software is that it can be expensive and can also be catastrophic for large organizations if poorly managed.

Some of the most common challenges with scheduling arise due to scheduling conflicts or poorly arranged schedules. Scheduling conflicts arise, for example, when an employee is scheduled to work at two locations at the same time. This is usually caused by changes made to the schedule by different people or lack of verification of the impact of the change on the rest of the schedule. Poorly arranged schedules include features such as lack of breaks between shifts and double shifts. This leads to poor production due to low staff morale and overwork as well as increasing the risk of accidents or mistakes due to fatigue of the employees.

In their simplest form, these problems involve only the assignment of days off, for example, in some of the less complex settings for the scheduling of nurses. A typical problem of this form requires the scheduler to give appropriate days off to each of a number of employees who work standard shifts while assuring that the required numbers of employees are on duty throughout the day and week. Effective staff scheduling consists of allocating the required workload to staff subject to a number of constraints. The main objectives of staff scheduling are to efficiently utilize resources, produce a schedule with a balanced workload, and satisfy individual preferences as much as possible.

There are various scheduling methods available and are discussed briefly below. The chosen scheduling method should conform to the department workload pattern to enable creation of effective and efficient employee schedules. Some scheduling models include fixed schedule method, rotation schedule method, pattern schedule method, coverage schedule method, assignment schedule method, and team schedule method. The fixed schedule method is mainly used where the workload is predictable; that is, the work is consistent and does not require a lot of flexibility. The rotation schedule method is used to ensure a balance between shifts; for example, the employees share the burden to be covered in 24 hrs in shifts such as morning shifts and evening shifts. Pattern schedule method sets the shift rotation by day of the week and is mainly applied where the work days usually change cyclically from one schedule period to another. An example of the pattern schedule method is where every employee is off every 2nd weekend. The coverage schedule method is used where the pattern of the workload is not consistent and a lot of flexibility is required. In this method, schedules are set according to the prevailing pattern in the workload. Assignment schedule method combines the aspect of time when one will be working and the assignment to be carried out; for example, at different times an employee will be in different departments. In the team schedule method, the employees are scheduled as a group; that is, there is one schedule for a group of workers following the same pattern or completing the same tasks.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we begin by giving some literature review. Next, we propose a multiobjective model with the description of notation and variables, constraints, and objective function. In Section 3, we report the results of a computational study of the proposed approach. Finally, in the last section we provide some concluding remarks and directions for future investigations.