Operations Research 2025
Abstract Submission

182. Optimization of Workforce Planning in Daycare Centers: Balancing Operational Needs and Legal Requirements

Invited abstract in session TD-3: Workforce Scheduling and Routing, stream Project Management and Scheduling.

Thursday, 14:30-16:00
Room: H5

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Bienvenu Bambi
LocalSolver
2. Emeline Tenaud
LocalSolver

Abstract

This talk presents an industrial application for workforce planning in a network of daycare centers and animal care facilities. The schedules are optimized for a week and aim to plan the activities of several hundred employees, considering about ten different functions. Each employee has specific availability constraints, work hour limits, and role qualifications. The demand for each function is determined by legal requirements regarding staff-to-child ratios and operational needs.
The problem is modeled with boolean decision variables representing employee-shift assignments, where shifts are generated based on minimum/maximum durations and time increments. The optimization model minimizes understaffing and overstaffing while respecting all operational constraints (legal requirements, employee work hour limits, and specific scheduling rules).
This highly combinatorial optimization problem has been efficiently solved using Hexaly, a global optimization solver combining exact and heuristic methods. The solver provides optimal solutions within minutes for real-world instances. Based on this optimization model, a web application has been developed. A demonstration of this application will be presented during the talk.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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