Feature Requests

This is a request to make costs dynamically configurable based on hours worked per day/week/month. In some cases, the cost of a shift depends on how many hours a person has already worked when they take that shift. If taking a shift would cause an employee to exceed their core hours and go into overtime, then part or all of that shift must be paid at the overtime rate. But if the same shift is assigned to someone who is not going into overtime, then it is paid at the base rate. For example: Some employees must be paid overtime if they work over 8 hours a day. There are 4 and 6 hour shifts in the dataset. If assigned 2x4 hour shifts, then all time is paid at the base rate. If assigned a 4 and 6 hour shift in the same day, then the additional 2 hours are paid at the overtime rate. Some employees must be paid overtime if they work more than 36 hours in a week. If assigned 32 hours of work for the week, assigning an additional 8 hour shift which would take them above their core hours in the week period must be paid at the overtime rate.

This is a request to make it possible to define shifts where one of a list of skills is required. It would be good if the required skills can be also be OR . So if I have two different skills but an employee has to have one of them. Today you can put in more than one skill but then it requires both of them.

Currently the global hourly demand rule only permits shift tags as attributes. It would be very useful to allow employee tags as well, like the global demand rule. So we can ensure for example, "every hour we have at least 1 employee working who can service a specific client or perform a specific task/role". Each employee would have a tag determining their eligibility to service a client or perform a specific task/role. We can't tag such attributes at shift level since any employee can cover the shifts spanning the hour.

We currently support weekendsLimit.weekendDaysWorkedMax for the maximum number of weekend days worked in a rolling window, but not the minimum equivalent. It would be useful to also support weekendsLimit.weekendDaysWorkedMin at the PREFERRED level, to reward the solver for assigning certain amounts of weekend days in a rolling window.

Currently, the optimizer balances understaffing and overstaffing using a shared weight or tradeoff. It would be helpful to control these separately, so we can strongly discourage understaffing while allowing more flexibility on overstaffing (or vice versa). This makes it easier to match different business priorities (for example, ensuring customer service levels are met even if that means slightly more staffing than optimal).

This is a request to be able to configure minutes-between-shifts rules for sequences longer than two back-to-back shifts. Currently, the maximum sequence length is capped at two, which prevents defining rules such as requiring at least 36 hours off after a sequence of four night shifts. Allowing longer sequences would provide more flexibility in planning and ensure adequate rest periods for extended consecutive work periods.

This is a request to make disruption rules more employee-focused. Currently, global disruption limits (e.g. allowing 1% of shifts to be changed) can still result in uneven outcomes; some employees may experience many disruptions while others are unaffected. Customers would like the ability to minimize or cap disruptions on a per-employee basis, ensuring changes are distributed more evenly. Possible approaches include balancing disruptions across employees or setting a hard limit (for example, allowing no more than 50% of an employee’s shifts to be disrupted). This would better support “human-centric” planning practices.

This is a request to be able to submit a tally of historic shifts instead of passing all historic shift data to the model. This would reduce payload size and memory usage while still allowing constraints (such as period rules) to consider past shifts. The goal is to improve efficiency and simplify input data handling where full historic data is not required.

This is a request to be able to assign customizable weights to different contract rules, similar to how weights can be set for multi-day pattern rules. This would allow more important rules (such as vacation constraints) to carry higher penalties, ensuring that critical preferences are respected during planning.

This is a request to allow the planner to consider certain skills as required or preferred only at the start of a shift, rather than for the entire shift duration. Currently, non-matching skills are penalized based on the total minutes an employee lacks the required skill during a shift. This is a request to also support cases where an employee’s skill is only necessary to start a shift.- for example, when shifts are scheduled in monthly blocks. In these cases, employees may still be responsible for covering late-night shifts that extend past the end of the month, even if their skill validity technically ends earlier. Supporting “start-of-shift” skill requirements would ensure these assignments are handled correctly.