Why Optimize
Why is scheduling so complex?
The complexity of producing a simple schedule lies in the rapid growth of the number of feasible schedules as the number of employees increases. How many schedules exist for the hypothetical case of 10 time periods to be covered by 10 employees?
The first employee can be assigned to any of the 10 time periods, the second to 9 the third to 8 and so on, for a total of factorial 10 (10! = 10x9x8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1 = 3,628,800) unique schedules.
For this simple type of scheduling problem, the number of unique solutions for 70 employees (10 followed by 100 zeros) becomes 100 trillion times greater than the number of hydrogen atoms in the universe (10 followed by 80 zeros).
And this is just a simple scheduling problem.
Are you sure you have the best schedule?
Manual solutions and solutions based on heuristics that are not well adapted to your operations lend themselves to the production of inefficient, wasteful schedules that misallocate precious human resources. Operations research based optimization techniques typically result in schedules which reduce payroll costs by 1%-10%.
