Workforce Planning - from sales to schedules

We present a comprehensive workforce planning approach from both a functional and technical perspective. Our approach forecasts the demand for staff in the future and schedules the employees accordingly. We give a high level overview of the complete planning process, which is decomposed in several steps. Two crucial optimization steps are discussed in more detail: first, we analyze the set of employees and the flexibility in their contract hours. Their individual weekly workload is optimized to match the varying demand. This step can be viewed as capacity planning, and is done using linear programming. The second step we discuss in detail is how we design and assign shifts to staff according to elaborate shift structure rules. To this end we use variable neighborhood search. Our entire planning is done on a detailed level of 15-minute intervals. The method was commercially implemented and is currently used in practice. We finish with our ideas for extending this work.