A 4-day or a 3-day workweeks scheduling problem with a given workforce size

This paper presents an exact decomposition approach for an employee days-off scheduling problem of an homogeneous workforce under serval realistic days-off scheduling constraints. These constraints include the following: (1) each employee is assigned to three or four consecutive days-off per week, (2) each employee is assigned at least four consecutive days-off per month and (3) each employee is assigned at least a weekend off per month. A three-step decomposition method is used to obtain the work assignments while respecting the labor demands and the stated constraints