Project Title: A Workforce Scheduling Mobile App for Restaurants with an Efficient Hybrid Heuristic Algorithm
Student: Haobo Peng
Course: BSc Hons Computer Science
	
Abstract:
Workforce Scheduling is a typical NP hard problem, but very important for company managers
to minimize mistakes in Human Resources management, maximize the usage of workforce resources
and reduce cost. Typical sophisticated heuristic algorithms for such problems are usually very
complex and require servers with great performance to actually execute them. This may not be
feasible for some small hospitality services such as small restaurants. This report introduces a
simple local search heuristic based on Simulated Annealing combined with the “adapted” idea in
the “Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search” algorithm. This algorithms is highly optimized by
applying delta evaluation and mechanisms to search only a fraction of the neighbourhood. We then
build an easy-to-use iOS app with this algorithm embedded, allowing managers to generate and
edit schedule anywhere at anytime on their mobile device. By applying it to solve 12 pre-defined
problem instances, we shown that all the optimizations made to the algorithm allow it to solve the
problem using much less time even on a mobile device while making sure that the quality of the
solution is not affected by too much.