Development and operational deployment of a staff rostering system using mathematical optimisation in a municipal water utility
Abstract
We developed a staff rostering system for complex employment and staffing requirements at a municipal water utility and deployed it in routine operations at the Water Purification Office of Suita City Waterworks Bureau, Japan, in May 2026. We estimated that preparing a monthly roster took approximately 2-3 h after deployment, compared with 12-18 h previously. The system represents roster states, effective staffing and office assignments using binary and auxiliary integer variables and optimises the entire planning horizon. When the normal model yields no feasible solution, a second stage attempts to generate a reference roster by penalising weekly day-off shortages while retaining the other hard constraints. Outputs identify shortages and meeting-date changes applied before solving. Computational experiments used operational inputs for 14 staff over 245 days. The baseline was solved to optimality in approximately 177 s; a modified meeting-day scenario produced a reference roster with five staff-days of shortage. Independent monthly solving without history produced 16 staff-week cases of excess days off across two month-boundary weeks. This case demonstrates the practical value of optimisation-based decision support for staff rostering in municipal water utilities by showing how mathematical optimisation can be integrated into roster preparation and checking workflows with reduced preparation time.
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BibTeX
@misc{kobayashi2026development,
title = {{Development and operational deployment of a staff rostering system using mathematical optimisation in a municipal water utility}},
author = {Takaaki Kobayashi and Satoshi Matsumura and Satoko Moriguchi},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.14674},
eprint = {2610.14674},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14674},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Development and operational deployment of a staff rostering system using mathematical optimisation in a municipal water utility
AU - Takaaki Kobayashi
AU - Satoshi Matsumura
AU - Satoko Moriguchi
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/10
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.14674
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14674
AB - We developed a staff rostering system for complex employment and staffing requirements at a municipal water utility and deployed it in routine operations at the Water Purification Office of Suita City Waterworks Bureau, Japan, in May 2026. We estimated that preparing a monthly roster took approximately 2-3 h after deployment, compared with 12-18 h previously. The system represents roster states, effective staffing and office assignments using binary and auxiliary integer variables and optimises the entire planning horizon. When the normal model yields no feasible solution, a second stage attempts to generate a reference roster by penalising weekly day-off shortages while retaining the other hard constraints. Outputs identify shortages and meeting-date changes applied before solving. Computational experiments used operational inputs for 14 staff over 245 days. The baseline was solved to optimality in approximately 177 s; a modified meeting-day scenario produced a reference roster with five staff-days of shortage. Independent monthly solving without history produced 16 staff-week cases of excess days off across two month-boundary weeks. This case demonstrates the practical value of optimisation-based decision support for staff rostering in municipal water utilities by showing how mathematical optimisation can be integrated into roster preparation and checking workflows with reduced preparation time.
ER -