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Method and apparatus for queue-based automated staff scheduling

Method and apparatus for queue-based automated staff scheduling description/claims

1. Technical Field

This invention relates to automation of staff or employee scheduling. More particularly, the invention relates to a method and apparatus for queue-based automated staff scheduling.

2. Description of the Prior Art

Staff scheduling is the process of matching a list of employees with a list of shifts or assignments (hereafter referred to as “assignments”) for a specified date range. The choice of a particular individual for a given assignment on a given day is generally subject to several constraints imposed by institutional scheduling policies and individual/group preferences. Scheduling a large task force in the presence of large number of such constraints, makes manual scheduling a daunting task. In many cases, it is infeasible to achieve a good schedule manually. Furthermore, the scheduling rules and preferences are rarely static. There are often exceptions to the scheduling rules and preferences based on various scheduling conditions. These problems also make it difficult to build a general purpose computer program that can automate employee scheduling.

The main challenges in automating the process are twofold:

1. How are the constraints, e.g. rules and preferences, which are specific to the institutional, social, and political environment of an organization, expressed in a form that can be represented in the internal data structures of a general purpose software system? Furthermore, how can these representations be used to express not only rules and individual preferences, but also their exceptions?

2. Once a representation has been found, what is the computational process that makes it tractable to choose a schedule among large number of possible schedules, which grow exponentially as the number of employees or assignments increases?

It would be advantageous to provide a method and apparatus that addresses these problems.

The invention disclosed herein addresses the above-mentioned problems by introducing a queue-based scheduling system. The invention disclosed herein comprises an automated staff scheduling computer program that is highly flexible in enforcing scheduling rules. This flexibility comes from the ability to:

1. Define conditional and unconditional rules;

2. Rank the rules/requests in varying priority as represented by a numeric value assigned to each rule/request; and

3. Specify rules both per individual and per group.

These three abilities synergistically produce an automatic scheduling system that can enforce a wide variety of scheduling rules and requirements seen in actual staff scheduling situations. Furthermore, all these abilities rely on using a queue per scheduled assignment to hold requests and rules.

FIG. 1 provides an example of constraints that go into scheduling an assignment on a given day according to the invention;

FIG. 2 shows an internal queue data structure that is used to hold rules and requests entered by a user; in FIG. 2, time scope field of the requests, or actions of rules, are used to determine into which queues the request is inserted according to the invention;

FIG. 3 shows the details of a request as stored in computer memory according to the invention;

FIG. 4 shows the details of a conditional rule as stored in computer memory according to the invention; and

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