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An Educational Tool for Learning Staff Scheduling Problem Based on OpenSolver

Published: 01 February 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Staff scheduling is an important and common optimization problem that has drawn much attention from both industrial and academia fields. Learning staff scheduling problems helps students not only master fundamental integer linear formulation techniques and solution methods, but also stimulate their interest in working on real-life problems. To build an easy-to-use and independent modeling and solution software that is suitable in classrooms, in this paper, we present an educational tool for teaching staff scheduling problems. We build the tool based on Microsoft Excel and OpenSolver, an open source add-in. The tool consists of interface for problem modeling and solution representation, allowing teachers to better present formulating process in teaching staff scheduling. We use a specific problem, which is derived from real-life settings, as a demonstrative example. The tool is incorporated in some of our courses. Feedback from students are provided and discussed.

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  1. An Educational Tool for Learning Staff Scheduling Problem Based on OpenSolver

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    EITCE '20: Proceedings of the 2020 4th International Conference on Electronic Information Technology and Computer Engineering
    November 2020
    1202 pages
    ISBN:9781450387811
    DOI:10.1145/3443467
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 01 February 2021

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    Author Tags

    1. Microsoft Excel
    2. OpenSolver
    3. Staff scheduling
    4. integer linear programming
    5. rotation assignment problem

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    EITCE 2020

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    EITCE '20 Paper Acceptance Rate 214 of 441 submissions, 49%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 508 of 972 submissions, 52%

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