If anybody's interested, for use in your consulting work, etc, I've written a web-based employee scheduling tool:

(oops, sorry - not allowed to post URLs yet... Will post it later.)

Non-commercial, free & no ads. It was inspired by some call-center scheduling work I did - it will generate an optimal schedule given a half-hourly workload & empoyee scheduling preferences & constraints.

hi sporkman

can you tell me more about this web based program?? what is it exactly?? and what is the key logic you have taken for this?

Hi LoTR,

The way it works is the user builds a schedule "specification", where a list of employees & their scheduling preferences & constraints is specified (can start work between such-n-such times daily, needs a half-hour lunch break if the shift exceeds such-n-such length, must work at least such-n-such hours, can't work on wednesday, etc). The user can specify up to 99 employees. The user also specifies the workload over the length of the scheduling period, in the form of # of people needed to be on duty for each half-hour interval.

Once the specs have been entered, the user can save them, then push a button, which will kick off a back-end process on the server that will generate a schedule of the employees to meet the workload while honoring their constraints & preferences...

Not sure what you mean by "key logic I have taken"...?

thanks. By mean of logic. i wanted to ask if you are using any probability & queuing model for scheduling purpose or using some thing like theory of constraints.

have a look at the book "The Goal"

thanks. By mean of logic. i wanted to ask if you are using any probability & queuing model for scheduling purpose or using some thing like theory of constraints.

have a look at the book "The Goal"

Thanks, I'll check out the book.

Re the logic, it's a straight-forward deterministic set covering problem, with extra constraints. My utility runs a heuristic to search for feasible solutions & chooses the best one found.