Models and Methods for Workforce Scheduling: An Application to Casino Operations

Labor costs become more and more important for a company’s success. This holds especially true for high-wage countries like Germany and for labor-intensive service industries like such as call centers or casinos. Efficient planning and allocation of personnel resources is therefore essential and quite a lot of models and methods for this so-called “workforce scheduling problem” have been developed thus far. Nevertheless, real problems are very different, complex, and specific. There exists no standard procedure to find optimal — or at least suboptimal — solutions (if the complexity of the problem is too great for exact algorithms). The formulation of the problem has to take into account the unique situation of a company and subsequently an appropriate solution method has to be adapted.