Rostering at a Dutch Security Firm

The roster planning process at the Dutch security firm NVD was traditionally carried out by hand. A few years NVD was traditionally carried out by hand. A few years ago, because of changing labor laws in the Netherlands, this became practically impossible. We developed a decision support system which has four main modules. The first one checks given rosters for feasibility with respect to the complicated rules of the current Collective Labor Agreement. A second module generates feasible rosters. The third one evaluates each roster with respect to its cost and ergonomic criteria. Finally, the fourth module uses mathematical programming based methods to select high quality rosters. The DSS has received rave reviews from upper management, security employees as well as the planners, who have gained enormous insight into the planning process. The DSS is currently being implemented and will be operational within the near future.