AN ALGORITHM FOR SINGLE SHIFT SCHEDULING OF HIERARCHICAL WORKFORCE

This paper presents an optimal algorithm for single shift scheduling o f hierarchical workforce in seven-day-a-week industries. There are man y categories of workers; their capabilities are arranged hierarchicall y. The objective is to arrive at the most economical mix of categories of employees satisfying the pattern of demand for employees and desir ed work characteristics. The demand for employees varies from one cate gory to the other and for each category the demand during weekdays is fixed and is different from that of weekends. The desired work charact eristics are: (i) each employee must be given two days off every week including at least a proportion A out of every B weekends off and (ii) each employee can have at most 5 working shifts between any two offda ys. The algorithm provides a computational scheme for arriving at the minimum workforce size comprising the most economical mix of categorie s of employees for this demand context and a new technique for charact erizing the problem to achieve feasible assignment of employees to shi fts.