Optimal Server Scheduling to Maintain Constant Customer Waiting Times

摘要

The purpose of this thesis was to develop an analytical model that would optimally schedule commissary checkers so that the expected customer waiting-time would remain relatively constant throughout the scheduling period. A two-phase model was developed to solve the problem. The first phase of the model used dynamic programming to find the optimal number of checkers required throughout each day to meet the desired customer waiting-time goal. Since checkers cannot be scheduled to work arbitrarily short tours of duty, a second phase was needed in the model to find the optimal number of checkers to assign to allowable shifts in order to meet the optimal requirements determined in phase one. A simulation was developed to validate the checker scheduling model. It was found that the scheduling model produced acceptable results until the last few periods of the day. Additional servers needed to be added heuristically near the end of each day to obtain the desired customer waiting times. Keywords: Checker scheduling algorithm. (KR)