Workforce Rostering

Rostering Staff for Changing Service Demand

Clients: The Preston Group and Cathay Pacific

CSIRO and The Preston Group, a Melbourne based firm that specialises in the development of simulation and optimisation software, have developed a software product which helps Cathay Pacific devise rosters for its airport services staff. It was originally developed for rostering the 500 staff working at Kai Tak Airport (operations have now shifted to Hong Kong International).

Work Schedules for Airport Staff

When in operation, Kai Tak was the world's busiest single runway airport. More than 22 million passengers passed through it each year. Passenger-related services such as check-in, boarding and baggage handling were carried out by Cathay Pacific's airport services staff. Staff rosters depend on aircraft arrivals and departures and were regulated by hundreds of business and industrial relations rules. Monthly rosters were previously drawn up by hand and carefully checked against the rules; a tedious and unpopular job taking days to complete. The staff scheduling software shortened this process to about five hours, and made rosterers and rosterees much happier.

The Cathay Pacific rostering requirements were different from many other rostering problems because of the flexibility of airport services officers' work. The demand for staff changes as aircraft arrive and depart and flights are delayed or diverted. Staff are multiskilled and may perform several tasks during a shift.

Faster, More Reliable Rostering

The Preston Group contacted the CSIRO because "their experience of rostering meant they were able to take a more academically rigorous approach to ensure the reliability and performance of the final product". CSIRO has provided the mathematical models and optimisation algorithms that underpin the product. The Preston Group developed links to Cathay Pacific's staff and industrial relations databases and created a friendly graphical user interface to hide the users from the complexity of the optimisation algorithms and database queries.

Cathay Pacific's staff, the end users, can be confident of fair, reliable rosters. They can check their shifts on a computer in the staff canteen and organise a swap if they want to.  Other workplaces with variable demand for services, such as hospitals, police stations, railway systems or banks, could use similar rostering systems to replace existing manual methods.

Client Feedback

"The work done by CSIRO was an exact match to our needs. We were quickly able to apply the prototype to the real system. The optimisation algorithm has proved very robust in operation on a day to day basis at Cathay Pacific." : Denis Dowling, The Preston Group

More about Workforce Rostering

For further information, see the workforce rostering page, or contact Andreas Ernst.

Page last updated February 10, 2009 04:07 PM by Mark Horn.