Staff rostering at a large international airport

The human resource planning and scheduling system described in this paper was designed to assist in the rostering and management of approximately 500 staff for the airport operations of a major international airline at one of the busiest international airports. It is difficult to efficiently staff counters and gates at busy airports due to the dynamic nature of airline schedules, daily changes to arrival and departure times, customer behaviour and other unpredictable disruptions. The system was designed to roster staff for a planned month so that the work load is evenly distributed among the staff, and so that the main productivity measures (idle time and total staff numbers) can be minimised. The rosters are subject to a large number of rules designed to ensure reasonable working conditions and service standards. The system then allocates individual tasks to the staff for any particular day, and effectively manages, in real-time, disruptions that occur due to aircraft delays and unplanned staff absences on the day of operations. The system is also designed to reduce the number of staff needed to run the present rostering system. In this paper we provide a description of the overall system and an algorithm for solving the rostering problem associated with the system. The task allocation algorithm is not described in this paper.