A fast-flexible strategy based approach to solving employee scheduling problem considering soft work time

Employee scheduling aims to assign employees to shifts to satisfy daily workload and constraints. Some employee scheduling problems and their variants have been proven NP-hard, and a series of works have been done. However, the existing algorithms consider the fixed work time, which may cause plenty of overstaffing and understaffing phenomenons. Hence, this paper proposes a fast-flexible strategy based approach (FFS) to solve it. FFS introduces the idea of soft work time, which allows the work time of employees can be adjusted in a range. Based on this, we set the flextime strategy to decide the specific work time of each employee every day. Besides, FFS adopts a pairwise-allocated strategy and proficiency average matrix to boost its efficiency and effectiveness. Finally, the extensive experimental evaluation shows that FFS is more effective and efficient than the baselines for solving the employee scheduling problem considering soft work time.