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Employee Scheduling

developers.google.com

111–120 of 137 posts

Re: Employee Scheduling

#111
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…

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...

What sort of software?

You could try http://jeffreykingston.id.au/khe/ which is free.

You can try it online at http://jeffreykingston.id.au/cgi-bin/hseval.cgi

Re: Employee Scheduling

#112
post #51
post #41

Employee scheduling seems to be a problem common to a large number of businesses. Are the needs of most small/medium businesses currently being met in this area or is there an opportunity for providing tools in this space ?

My sister is in charge of scheduling physicians for shifts and on call for a large hospital and she has a really hard time. She does it manually with the help of a spreadsheet. She engaged with some software company to help and after many hours of work she still uses the spreadsheet. Part of the problem is that some senior physicians do whatever they want and aren't interested in playing fair. They'll call her the da…

See my link above for KHE. It also does nursing schedules which may help you.

Re: Employee Scheduling

#113

Maybe a little OT, but why aren't the OR-tools in general more focused (or more "marketed") towards GPU/TPU clouds since they seem like the exact problems which they are made for? More focus seems to be towards TF/PT/NN and not the real problems like what OR-tools and solvers in general push for.

For starters, CP and SAT are based on integers and boolean variables. Secondly, local search and systematic search are just no way near parallelizable to the degree required to see gains running GPU/TPU.

Re: Employee Scheduling

#114
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.

Computers solve the legible problems. But scheduling is one where the problems lack in hard specification, and plans involve several "layers" of prioritization, so what's called for is approximate results that avoid failure modes, which is something a skilled human does pretty well.

I do think that software speeds up some parts of the process, but like so many automated processes, it's computer assistance, not computer intelligence.

Re: Employee Scheduling

#115
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 published more effective code for solving this crucial need.

See issue number 1 for the semantic web, social network Radiojade:

https://github.com/foundpatterns

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint_Handling_Rules

I need your help with finishing it though. Contact me on LinkedIn

Re: Employee Scheduling

#117
post #69
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://forio.com/app/showcase/nurse-scheduling/nurses.html?... Thursday, 02:00 to 08:00 — Emergency Thursday, 08:00 to 12:00 — Oncology Thursday, 12:00 to 18:00 — Oncology Friday, 08:00 to 12:00 — Emergency

Turns out Gloria is an incredibly hard worker.

It's the pandemic thing everyone's working overtime

Re: Employee Scheduling

#118
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 was reading some old literature a few months ago on this related to police staffing where union issues had to be taken into account. It seems adding social penalties is a way to do this algorithmically

Re: Employee Scheduling

#119
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 was reading some old literature a few months ago on this related to police staffing where union issues had to be taken into account. It seems adding social penalties is a way to do this algorithmically

You’re giving me flashbacks to some software I worked on a while ago that had to use rules from three different collective agreements from nursing unions. Turns out writing business logic for rules that aren’t internally consistent is a challenge, and unlike most LOB projects I’ve worked on, the procedure can not be amended until the next round of bargaining.

Re: Employee Scheduling

#120
post #109
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascinating. Can you give some examples of the priorities you incorporated that would be hard for off-the-shelf software to digest?

The biggest challenge is just addressing the constantly shifting math on what is 'good'. So late night shifts are generally undesirable, but required to be covered and so you really want to spread them out. Having said that for some folks they'd rather do a bunch in a row, others spread them out. Some folks mind them less than others. Just making the math decide that an even number across the whole team is 'fair' alw…

Thanks.
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