Re: Assignmnet problem with rules

Ayende Rahien wrote:
I know that you probably rehashed the subject many time here, but
googling doesn't give me any good info on the subject.
I need to find a good enough solution to the following problem:
Assign an employee to a shift with rules.

I've a set of employees and a set of shifts. Assigning an employee to a
shift change the results of rules for the whole system. So I can't just
use normal wieghts to find it.

I started out thinking about trying something like:
- Assign Employee to Shift
- Check system state
- If good, continue
- If bad, mark this combination as bad and move to next employee
- drop all bad states that were recorded before this step.
- Keep going until I run out of shifts, employees or valid states.
- If I found a solution (all shifts are assigned), finish
- If solution not found, back one step, mark it as invalid, and keep
trying.

The problem with this appraoch is that it would probably take too long.
(Normal workload would be about 100 - 300 employees with ~500 shifts
to assign.

What you're trying to do falls under the "planning and scheduling" branch
of the artificial intelligence field. People spend entire careers
developing solutions to scheduling problems, so obviously you can infer
that there must not be a simple answer that can solve every scheduling
problem.

The good news is that lots of people have worked on this type of stuff
and have developed some great techniques for certain problems. You'd
probably have better luck getting answers if you asked some AI people.
It would also be helpful to formulate your problem in more detail: if
you do ask AI people, the answers they give will probably depend on
specifics of your problem.

- Logan
.

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