Solver independent rotating workforce scheduling

Abstract

The rotating workforce scheduling problem aims to schedule workers satisfying shift sequence constraints and ensuring enough shifts are covered on each day, where every worker completes the same schedule, just starting at different days in the schedule. We give two solver independent models for the rotating workforce scheduling problem and compare them using different solving technology, both constraint programming and mixed integer programming. We show that the best of these models outperforms the state-of-the-art for the rotating workforce scheduling problem, and that solver independent modeling allows us to use different solvers to achieve different aims: e.g., speed to solution or robustness of solving (particular for unsatisfiable problems). We give the first complete method able to solve all of the standard benchmarks for this problem.