Determination of work schedule type by dynamic programming

In this paper, we applied dynamic programming to determining work schedule type. In dynamic programming formulation, each day during a planning horizon represents a stage for which a decision is made. The alternatives are given by work schedule types that combine regular time, overtime, additional shift, and so on. In this case, their associated return function is labor cost. The state is defined as the amount of work time allocated to stage 1, stage 2, …, and current stage. A case study for a real manufacturing company was performed to apply dynamic programming to scheduling daily work hours during a week. The case study showed that total cost of our solution derived from dynamic programming decreased by about 6% as compared with the solution obtained from the previous method.