Employee Scheduling Methods Using a Calculator

Judith Aronow

5590 Frost
Beaumont, TX 77706
USA
Phone: (409) 892-9141
Fax: (409) 835-5432
aronowju@hal.lamar.edu

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ABSTRACT

Employee scheduling, particularly in service organizations such as hospitals, utilities, police organizations and many others providing service around the clock, is critical to the life of the organization. The objective in creating these schedules is to provide continuous, efficient service at minimum cost and minimum idle time, and yet to provide opportunity for sufficient days off for knowledgeable personnel.

Cyclic scheduling in which there are days on and days off is a constraint in these scheduling problems. While integer programming is used to solve the majority of problems, in many instances, a calculator can also be used for smaller facilities, providing students in operations research and discrete mathematics a dynamic and interesting insight into some common scheduling problems. Algorithms will be demonstrated using easily implemented interactive calculator methods.

Keyword(s): calculators, linear programming