What is a statutory constraint?

Is there a constraint-based scheduling system available for a small business who employ workers from a pool of availability and specialisations (such as in the culinary/restaurant industry)?

• It can be quite involved to optimally put together a balanced fair schedule for a team of workers in the culinary industry, especially when presented with the dynamism of this line of work (last minute changes, personal availability of the workers as well as subjective factors) as well as the complexity of putting together an entire schedule (one small change can tip the balance and require a new solution).  Maintaining a traditional spreadsheet involves a lot of manual work, not to mention the problems inherent in emailing such a schedule around (and encountering inconsistencies).  Certainly a cloud spreadsheet solution addresses the collaborative editing aspect, and for this there are Google spreadsheets, Zoho, or maybe some cloud offering from Microsoft.  But that doesn't really address the dynamism of the industry, and there's a lot of complexity and specific variances involved in the case of each particular business, so deciding to build a vertical product that perfectly suits the needs of that company might require a lot of effort and ongoing maintenance, and then it couldn't easily be ported. Instead, what about declaring or constraining the kind of requirements needed for a given weekly schedule, and let there be a kind of fuzzy algorithm that will pick and choose teammates to be available during a given time frame?  A solution like this might not get all the heuristics right the first time around, but it could learn from the eventual input and tweaking on part of the administrator for that team.  So some rules could be inferred, and the balance between variation and consistency/stability could be discerned as the product is used over time.  This kind of constraint solving would be centered not just around basic equational constraints, but there is a time element since this is a matter of bringing a certain subset of the crew on board for the day either during peak hours or off hours (for preparation).  The clients signing up (or maybe product availability or day of week) are ultimately driving the schedule, so when it's known that a client has particular needs (whether it's stated or inferred) then that can help decide what kind of schedule can be put in place to optimally make use of the available team and still meet overall balancing requirements. Come to think of it, there are also many ways that this whole process can be optimised including analytics on the products ordered, detailed feedback from the customers and clients, schedules of availability for the workers, and so on.  A large software package or ecosystem that tried to do this might still face challenges about the particulars and specifics of each company's situation (especially in the area of programmability or adaptability), so maybe a startup is looking into this.  But a potentially fully integrated system, even involving each employee carrying tablets with continually synchronised data, might be out there that satisfies the programmability or adaptability aspect, so I'm wondering how I might search for such a startup, as this can help save a lot of time and headaches.  And might Office macros have some hidden magic that allows the spreadsheet to rearrange itself based upon what's entered, thus virtually emulating this functionality on top of an existing infrastructure?  If someone has developed such a beast, would it be portable?  Is constraint-based scheduling or problem solving the right concept here?  What might it be merged with?

• Answer:

  I know general managers that still refuse to use electric money counters, they'll count upwards of thousands of dollars by hand. Yes, manually entering a schedule through a spreadsheet is time consuming, but so much more goes into a schedule that works for your team than availability.Your idea sounds good in theory however scheduling is not solely based on availability. Certain shifts are better, these go to the best employees, or, sadly, to the longest employed individuals. If this system were to: -Give weight to certain shifts and individual employees -Be very simplistic -Not need extra hardware (small business owners will not want to spend more money, large businesses won't want to fork over large sums for all their employees) -Work! -Do all your mind work for you- take request off's through email and directly apply them to the scheduling algorithm, create "weight" for certain shifts and the same for individual employees (a rank based system, perhaps?), take into account private parties and national holidays. (There is so much more that goes into scheduling now that I've stopped to think about it). Hope this helps!