Example 15.

1
Daily Scheduling of Postal Employees
Workforce Scheduling Models
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Objective
To use LP, with integer variables, to find the
optimal schedule of employees to handle
daily staffing requirements.
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Background Information
A post office requires different numbers of full-time
employees on different days of the week.
The number of full-time employees required each day
is given in the table below.
Minimum Employees Required
Monday 17
Tuesday 13
Wednesday 15
Thursday 19
Friday 14
Saturday 16
Sunday 11
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Background Information --
continued
Union rules state that each full-time employee must
work five consecutive days and then receive two
days off.
The post office wants to meet its daily requirements
using only full-time employees.
Its objective is to minimize the number of full-time
employees that must be hired.
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Solution
To model this problem in Excel we must keep track of
the following:
number of employees starting work their 5-day shift on
each day of the week
number of employees working each day
total number of employees

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POSTAL1.XLS
The spreadsheet model for this problem appears
below and can be developed by following these
steps:
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Developing the Model
Daily requirements. Enter the number of employees
needed on each day of the week in the MinReqd range.
Employees starting each day. Enter any trial values for the
number of employees starting their 5-day shift on each day
of the week in the Starting range.
Employees on hand each day. The key to this solution is to
realize that the numbers in the Starting range do not
represent the number of workers who will show up each day.
A simple way to see who shows up when, is to develop a
table as in rows 14-20. We link the values in the Starting
range to the appropriate places in this table. We enter the
formula $B$4 in B14 and copy it across to F14. We proceed
for the other starting dates in rows 15-20. Then we sum
down each column to obtain the number of workers who
work each day in row 21.
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Developing the Model
Total employees. Calculate the total number of employees
in cell B25 with the formula =SUM(Starting)
At this point, you might try rearranging the number in
the Starting range to see if you can guess an
optimal solution. Its not that easy!
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Using Solver
Now that the model has been formulated, the Solver
setup is straightforward.
We minimize the total number of employees, subject
to having enough employees available to meet the
minimal day requirements.
We also constrain the changing cells to be
nonnegative and check the Assume Linear Model in
the Solver Options dialog box.
Here is the solver dialog box selecting these options:
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Using Solver -- continued
The optimal solution is determined as follows.
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Using Solver -- continued
To be realistic all values in the changing cells should
be integers. Fortunately, this can be accomplished
quite easily with Solver.
To require any of the cells to be integers, we add an
extra constraint in the main Solver dialog box. Now
we select int instead of <=,=, or >= in the Add
Constraint window.
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Using Solver -- continued
With this extra constraint added, the optimal integer
solution appears next.
This solution indicates that the post office needs to
hire 23 full-time employees, and the Starting range
shows how to schedule them.
The solution reveals an interesting aspect common to
many optimization problems.
Because of irregular daily requirements and two-
consecutive-days-off constraint, no solution can
exactly match available workers to daily
requirements.
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Solution -- continued
Sometimes the optimal solution to a modeling
problem isnt the perfect solution were looking for,
but its the best possible solution.
There is another interesting aspect to this problem.
You may get a different solution that is still optimal -
that is - it uses a total of 23 employees and meets all
constraints. There are at least two optimal solutions
and the one you obtain depends on the initial values
you use in the changing cells.
This is the case of multiple optimal solutions and is
not all uncommon in LP models.
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Solution -- continued
Our model can easily be expanded to handle part-
time employees, the use of overtime, alternative
objective functions such as maximizing the number of
weekend days off received by employees, and other
possibilities.
One simple alternative version of the model is
illustrated on the next slide.
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POSTAL2.XLS
The alternative spreadsheet model appears below .
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Alternative Model
Instead of minimizing the number of workers on the
payroll, we now pay a slightly larger wage on the
weekend days and minimize the total weekly payroll.
The only difference in this model is that the formula
for the total weekly payroll in cell B29 is now
=B4*SUM(B25:F25) + B5*SUM(G25:H25)
Perhaps surprisingly, the optimal solution to this
problem is the same as when we treated weekends
and weekdays equally.