Days-off scheduling for a bus transportation company

摘要

Staff scheduling has become increasingly important for both public sector and private companies. Good rosters have many benefits for an organisation, such as lower costs, more effective utilisation of resources and fairer workloads and shifts. The construction of optimised days-off for the personnel is an important part of the process. This paper presents a successful way to schedule days-off for the staff of a Finnish bus transportation company. The algorithm is a variation of the cooperative local search method. The generated software is currently in use in the company. In the paper, we also present the first collection of artificial test instances for the days-off scheduling.