“You have to get wet to learn how to swim” applied to bridging the gap between research into personnel scheduling and its implementation in practice

Ann Oper Res DOI 10.1007/s10479-017-2574-4 PATAT 2016 “You have to get wet to learn how to swim” applied to bridging the gap between research into personnel scheduling and its implementation in practice Sanja Petrovic1 © The Author(s) 2017. This article is an open access publication Abstract Personnel scheduling problems have attracted research interests for several decades. They have been considerably changed over time, accommodating a variety of constraints related to legal and organisation requirements, part-time staff, flexible hours of staff, staff preferences, etc. This led to a myriad of approaches developed for solving personnel scheduling problems including optimisation, meta-heuristics, artificial intelligence, decisionsupport, and also hybrids of these approaches. However, this still does not imply that this research has a large impact on practice and that state-of-the art models and algorithms are widely in use in organisations. One can find a reasonably large number of software packages that aim to assist in personnel scheduling. A classification of this software based on its purpose will be proposed, accompanied with a discussion about the level of support that this software offers to schedulers. A general conclusion is that the available software, with some exceptions, does not benefit from the wealth of developed models and methods. The remaining of the paper will provide insights into some characteristics of real-world scheduling problems that, in the author’s opinion, have not been given a due attention in the personnel scheduling research community yet and which could contribute to the enhancement of the implementation of research results in practice. Concluding remarks are that in order to bridge the gap that still exists between research into personnel scheduling and practice, we need to engage more with schedulers in practice and also with software developers; one may say we need to get wet if we want to learn how to swim. Keywords Personnel scheduling · Software for personnel scheduling · Personnel scheduling research directions B Sanja Petrovic 1 Nottingham University Business School, Jubilee Campus, Wollaton Road, Nottingham, NG8 1BB, UK 123 Ann Oper Res 1 Introduction Personnel scheduling can be defined as the process of assignment of personnel to shifts to cover the demand for resources that varies over time (Ernst et al. 2004b). The personnel scheduling problems exist almost everywhere, in service industry such as health care sector (nurse rostering, scheduling of surgeons, etc.), transport and logistic sector (crew rostering and crew scheduling in airlines, railways, bus companies, mass transit companies, etc.), civic services (libraries, post-offices, universities, etc.) call-centres, manufacturing, venue management. Personnel scheduling has attracted research interests since 1950s (Edie 1954). Personnel scheduling problems have been considerably changed since then, accommodating a variety of constraints related to legal and organisation requirements, part-time staff, flexible hours of staff, staff preferences, etc. This led to a myriad of approaches developed for solving personnel scheduling problems, which can be classified in the following groups: optimisation, meta-heuristics, artificial intelligence, decision-support, and also hybrids of these approaches. There is a large volume of personnel scheduling literature, which consequently led to a number of survey papers. They offer different classification of personnel scheduling problems and provide comprehensive collections of the relevant literature (Burke et al. 2004; Ernst et al. 2004b; Van den Bergh et al. 2013). An annotated bibliography of more than 700 papers has been collated by Ernst et al. (2004a). The papers were organised by the type of scheduling problem they addressed and by the application area. There are numerous benefits of generating high quality personnel schedules which include: reduced cost of human resources (in many organizations the cost of personnel forms the major part of the direct cost), better provision of service (for example, satisfying adequately the demand for service with skilled personnel, or providing consistency in personnel offering service, where it is relevant), increase in the job satisfaction of personnel, increase of the well-being of personnel, retention of the personnel, increase in the perception of the fairness of a schedule. Ultimately, these can assist in the recruitment of new personnel. Therefore, the impact of research into personnel scheduling on practice has high potentials. However, as Jan van de Snepscheut, California Institute of Technology, noted “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.” Due to the advances in technology it becomes more and more common that managers use some software packages to assist them to greater or smaller extent in generating personnel schedules. Such software packages usually include a variety of features to enable managers to easily create and employees to easily access the schedule. Common features include import/export of data describing employees, access to the software through mobile devices, access to the software through cloud servers, which means that the software can be accessed from any computer with an internet connection, posting schedules online so that employees can view them on their computers or mobile devices, sending text and/or e-mails to employees reminding them of their shifts, etc. This gives a great opportunity to employ computer science and software development knowledge to advance personnel scheduling. Some additional nice features include the ability to click and drag an employee’s name into a schedule, and synchronisation of the employee schedule with his/her calendar applications. However, the main question of interest here is how powerful the scheduling algorithms that these software packages employ are? Do they represent the state-of-the-art in the personnel scheduling research community? It is recognised that Operational Research techniques can produce high quality rosters, but that they have not been fully exploited and implemented in healthcare (Utley 2016). There is hardly any research study about the implementation of developed methods for personnel 123 Ann Oper Res scheduling in practice. To the best of our knowledge the only paper was published by Kellogg and Walczak (2007) and it was focused on nurse scheduling. The authors thoroughly investigated 50 models and methods published in the literature in the period 1985–2005 and their implementation in practice. The authors gathered required information from published papers and also by contacting the authors via e-mails. They reported that 15 models (30%) were implemented, while six of them were still in use in 2007 (the remaining ones were not in use or their usage was not known). This paper does not aim to repeat this endeavour and investigate if there h (...truncated)