HEAP - Hospitality Employees’ Automated Planning

Hotels in the Aegean islands and in particular in Sifnos need to share employees from a common a pool due to the high scarcity of employee resources. As a result they need to create staff plan that can accommodate the needs of more than one hotels within a very tight time window and limited resources. The main two constraints are completing the tasks, cleaning the rooms, within a tight time window and making sure that employees are not working above their contractual working times. The objective is to minimise the overtime and travelling of the between the hotels of the employees and minimise the running cost.

Categories

Developed by
Business Category
Cultural Heritage
Technical Category
Planning and scheduling

The scenario deals with planning the cleaning activities of 3 hotels located in the island of Sifnos in Greece that employ 6 cleaners in total. The plan needs to have a single day horizon since changes happen on a daily basis and the hotel managers need to run the scheduling the night before.

The solution manages:

  • The hotel rooms cleaning does not exceed the contracted timelines and in case it does this is tracked with the Gantt Charts.
  • Cleaning employees are not over stretched and overtime work is predicted and planned.
  • Travelling time of cleaners has been reduced significantly
  • The validation of the staff plan is automated nor systematic and it does not relies on the experience of a single hotel manager anymore. 
  • The manual nature of the generation of the plan does not allow any multi-objective optimization and the simultaneous satisfaction of constraints set by hotels and employees.
  • Scheduling calculation time has been reduced dramatically. For the generation of 80 tasks, 6 cleaners and 6 hotels , a rough order of magnitude for the scheduling calculation time is around 15 seconds.
  • Changes in the demand and the employees’ availability happening within the week can be accommodated by the plan, and the plan/schedule can be easily updated.
  • Communication between personnel and hotel managers is not disconnect. Hotel managers and employees collaboration for the generation and distribution of the staff plan 
  • Data entry and data visualization time has been reduced significantly.
  • Schedules versioning is used
  • Employees have access to schedules/plans, Gantt Charts, itinerary diagrams with maps.