Flexible employee scheduling in the context of the Port of Beirut

Abstract

Employee scheduling, the process of methodically assigning employees to work hours, has been studied in many different areas and can originally be traced back to work on traffic delays at toll booths. Given the large number of application areas and the important economic impact of the scheduling problem, many different approaches to scheduling have been studied and a host of terminologies have emerged to specify the particularities of each approach. We propose in this work a two-phase employee scheduling algorithm designed for the busy context of a port. Constraining our problem only with Labor law requirements and health and safety measures, we seek to generate flexible schedules that minimize the idle hours of the employees while covering demand.