Storing and Adapting Repair Experiences in Employee Rostering

The production of effective workforce rosters is a common management problem. Rostering problems are highly constrained and require extensive experience to solve manually. The decisions made by expert rosterers are often subjective and are difficult to represent systematically. This paper presents a formal description of a new technique for capturing rostering experience using case-based reasoning methodology. Examples of previously encountered constraint violations and their corresponding repairs are used to solve new rostering problems. We apply the technique to real-world data from a UK hospital.