A support system for nursery staff shift scheduling —A case study at a nursery school

Abstract

This paper introduces a 0-1 integer programming model for scheduling nursery staff shifts. A support system is designed to manage challenges such as satisfying nursery school requests and reducing the scheduling workload. The scheduling goals are to reduce the number of times per month nursery staff are given the same shift as well as the numbers of consecutive early, late, and identical shifts. To achieve this, we place weighted penalties on the constraints requested by the nursery school and use an objective function that minimized these penalties. The schedule obtained by the support system improved the management of nursery staff shift scheduling, and comparisons with schedules drawn up by hand confirmed the superiority of those produced by the system.