A Constraint Programming Application for Rotating Workforce Scheduling - Developing Concepts in Applied Intelligence - page 87

7 Comparison with the Commercial System FCS

Table 1 compares the performance of CP-Rota with that of FCS on 20 real-
life instances from [10]. To the best of our knowledge, FCS is a state-of-the-art
commercial system for generating rotating workforce schedules. We tested all in-
stances on a Pentium 4, 1.8 GHZ, 512 MB RAM, using the latest versions of FCS ,
GNU Prolog (1.3.1) and SWI-Prolog (5.9.10). Except where stated otherwise,
timing results are from GNU Prolog.
The table shows that CP-Rota nicely complements its predecessor so that
3 more instances than previously can now be solved. On 7 instances, CP-Rota
outperforms FCS already with its default strategy (

S 1 ), the converse holds for

6 instances.

8 Future Work

Future improvements to CP-Rota include the addition of a more convenient user
interface, real-time interaction with decision makers and the implementation of
additional allocation strategies.

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