Scheduling workforce for retail stores with employee preferences

Traditional brick-and-mortar retailers are facing increasing pressures due to the rapid growth of E-commerce and high employee turnover inherent to the retail industry. To drive continuous growth and profits, brick-and mortar retailers need effective store workforce scheduling methods that cope with employee preferences in order to simultaneously cut cost and improve employee satisfaction. In this paper, a mixed integer programming model is proposed for this purpose. Employee's satisfaction is maximized by satisfying employee's preferences for leave and working partners to the largest extent, and balancing working hours among employees. The proposed model is tested on an apparel retail store in China. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.