Shift Scheduling of Short Time Workers in Large-Scale Home Improvement Center by using Cooperative Evolution

Abstract

There are a lot of large-scale Home Improvement Center (HIC) in Japan. In the large-scale HIC,about hundred short time workers are registered. And about forty workers are working every day. A managercreates a monthly shift schedule. The manager selects the workers required for each working day, assigns theworking time and break time for each worker and also work placement. Because there are many requirementsfor the scheduling, the scheduling consumes time costs and efforts. Therefore, we propose the technique to createand optimize the schedule of the short time workers in order to reduce the burden of the manager. A cooperativeevolution is applied for generating and optimizing the shift schedule of short time worker. Several problems hasbeen found in carrying out this research. This paper proposes techniques to automatically create and optimize theshift schedule of workers in large-scale HIC by using a Cooperative Evolution (CE), to solve the situation thatmany workers concentrate in a speci c time zone, and to solve the situation where many breaks are concentratedin a speci c break time zone, and an effective mutation operators.