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  6. Scheduling Workforce Relief Breaks In Advance Versus In Real-Time

Scheduling Workforce Relief Breaks In Advance Versus In Real-Time

File(s)
Thompson12_Scheduling_Workforce.pdf (497.59 KB)
Permanent Link(s)
https://hdl.handle.net/1813/72124
Collections
SHA Articles and Chapters
Author
Thompson, Gary
Pullman, Madeleine E.
Abstract

This paper focuses upon employee rest breaks, or reliefs, in workforce scheduling. Historically, the workforce scheduling literature has largely ignored reliefs, as less than 18% of the 64 papers we surveyed scheduled reliefs. The argument has been that one need not schedule reliefs in advance, since they can easily be scheduled in real-time. We find this argument to be flawed. We show that failing to schedule reliefs in advance will have one of two undesirable outcomes. First, there will be a less profitable deployment of labor should all reliefs actually be taken in real-time. Second, if some reliefs are never assigned or if relief-timing restrictions are relaxed so that more reliefs may be assigned in real-time, there will be a disgruntled and less productive workforce and perhaps violations of contractual obligations. Our findings are supported by anecdotal evidence drawn from commercial labor scheduling software.

Date Issued
2007-08-01
Keywords
manpower planning
•
scheduling
•
relief breaks
Related DOI
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2006.05.018
Rights
Required Publisher Statement: © Elsevier. Final version published as: Thompson, G., & Pullman, M. E. (2007). Scheduling workforce relief breaks in advance versus in real-time. European Journal of Operational Research, 181(1), 139-155. doi:10.1016/j.ejor.2006.05.018 Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.
Type
article

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