Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Employee Scheduling

developers.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 137 posts

Re: Employee Scheduling

#71

Post by marcosdumay »

duxup wrote: post #66
cosmodisk wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the senior teachers in my school used to organise schedule for 1000 pupils and 50+ teachers. With some minor things everything worked pretty damn well.Then they decided to get some software to do the same.Never ended up working...

Humans might be kinda slow and expensive, but their ability to handle a lot of variable data and inputs and weigh them dynamically, filter out absurd results before applying them, and etc is pretty amazing. Like if someone comes to me and says "what if we... did X with the schedule". I could tell them how to do that and not to right away. The code would have to be changed / rewritten and tested and fail at it each ti…

> their ability to handle a lot of variable data and inputs and weigh them dynamically

I dunno. Computers are pretty good at this one too, on different kinds of variance and weights.

The largest problem I see is that everyone is discussing "either or" on this thread, while the clear winner is both.

Re: Employee Scheduling

#72

Post by cerved »

coleca wrote: post #68

Interesting project, I'd like to see it take into account decades of ambiguous union contracts, past practices, seniority, preferences, time off requests, preferences, training and certification levels, and not to mention the various local, state and federal labor laws. Scheduling isn't an easy problem to solve in the real world vs the lab where there are far less constraints and consequences for getting it wrong. Kr…

CP solvers are excellent at handling side constraints, at least as long as they can be expressed as a boolean, discrete or linear relation.

Re: Employee Scheduling

#73

Post by duxup »

marcosdumay wrote: post #71
duxup wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans might be kinda slow and expensive, but their ability to handle a lot of variable data and inputs and weigh them dynamically, filter out absurd results before applying them, and etc is pretty amazing. Like if someone comes to me and says "what if we... did X with the schedule". I could tell them how to do that and not to right away. The code would have to be changed / rewritten and tested and fail at it each ti…

> their ability to handle a lot of variable data and inputs and weigh them dynamically I dunno. Computers are pretty good at this one too, on different kinds of variance and weights. The largest problem I see is that everyone is discussing "either or" on this thread, while the clear winner is both.

I think ultimately if you're working with humans the question is if you want the schedule to solve a sort of math problem for you ... or if you want folks to be happy.

They are very much not the same thing and the dynamic nature of keeping people happy and filling a schedule is extremely difficult to account for with software.

Re: Employee Scheduling

#74

Post by apelapan »

nappy-doo wrote: post #11
michaelt wrote: post #6

I see their documentation also covers routing vehicles across multiple deliveries, with time windows. Can someone who's tested this stuff out advise on how many deliveries it can handle at a time? The examples only list trivial problems, but that might just be to keep the examples short.

I can chime in. Googler here, who knows the OR team very well. They are solving EXTREMELY large problems for customers. I can't tell you who, and I can't tell what problems, but they are among the biggest OR problems you can imagine. (No, I don't mean within Google, although they solve scheduling problems there as well.) EDIT: There are articles: https://cloud.google.com/press-releases/2020/0120/lufthansa https://www…

The articles are more statement of ambition than indication of actually "solving problems". I will follow whatever information gets out about this project with great interest.

The big challenge in making something like this actually work, are not the fancy hightech bits. Dealing with humdrum data integrations and torrential rates of change in rules and constraints, sourced from hundreds of mostly non-technical people across dozens of independent departments is where it gets hard.

Re: Employee Scheduling

#77

Post by dzink »

We had to find a solution for doctors to manage 22 different peers distributing 30 shifts a month. The schedule had to abide by each employees vacation requests and distributed undesirable shifts like weekends and holidays in some equitable manner, and be easily interpreted by staff. The solution was an excel spreadsheet with a lot of auto-fill logic and formulas to show shift and burden counts for each doctor so the person managing the sheet could move around shifts when needed and ensure equitable distribution still remained. Excel really helped where python and other tools would require a lot more code and be a lot less flexible to operator changes.

Re: Employee Scheduling

#78

Post by mooreds »

duxup wrote: post #54

Technical solution aside: I wrote a schedule for a team of ~20 co-workers for a 24/7 support shop. This required people change shifts / sleep schedules often. The schedule was a point of contention for years. After I volunteered to write the schedules, in 3 months I had everyone happy. It was not hard.....but.... The catch was that I did it manually for a month at a time with a wide ranging amount of changing priorit…

This is a nice reminder that some things just aren't amenable to automation. Things shift too often and/or the number and type of exceptions just aren't worth automating.

Re: Employee Scheduling

#79

Post by tgflynn »

graycat wrote: post #57

WOW! There is still some interest in optimization? I'm shocked! The message long was "Operations Research is dead." Gee, I got started in OR (operations research) at FedEx, covered a lot from some of the best people in grad school, taught it as a prof in B-school, and applied it to US national security and some commercial problems. Good to see the interest in some of the flight operations work for Lufthansa -- I was…

> The message long was "Operations Research is dead."

Could you elaborate on why that was perceived to be the case ?

It seems like the number of applications is very large and I suspect the technology is under-exploited outside of very large organizations.

Re: Employee Scheduling

#80

Post by larrydag »

saagarjha wrote: post #2

I’m a bit uncertain about what Google OR-Tools is…it seems to be some sort of framework for solving optimization problems, but based on the example here I am curious how general such a tool can be, as normally I find that a “drop in” algorithms framework is generally quite difficult to make or use. Is anyone using this for something useful? Does it perform faster than a hand-rolled implementation tailored to the prob…

There are a lot of optimization software tools available. One of my favorite is GLPK which is a free software implementation of AMPL. I created a employee scheduling framework for GLPK. It's listed as one of the examples in the download.

https://www.gnu.org/software/glpk/

Post reply on HN