A PB-SAT based methodology to solve Personnel shift Scheduling problem

Abstract

The shift scheduling of personnel/staff is one of the important tasks performed in any organization to ensure proper utilization of employees. This certainly assures profit in several aspects like money and time. In this paper, the scheduling of employees is considered with two different shifts (4 hour and 8 hours). The objective of the problem is to optimize the employee engagement in those shifts. The proposed approach solved the employee shift scheduling problem using pseudo-Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) based technique. The SAT based methodology is able to solve the scheduling problem efficiently and obtains the minimum number of employees required for each shift on a particular day. Several experiments are performed on different test cases to show the algorithm effectiveness.