In shift planning, short-term uncertainties in the availability of workers with different skills often lead to deviations. The strategic calculations based on expected values do not match the actual workforce present. In practice, attempts are then made to fill the different operational positions in the best possible way in each case. In this paper, an innovative concept is developed and prototypically implemented, which supports an optimal allocation of the present workforce and already takes this into account when evaluating different shift schedules. For the realistic case of a power plant, two given shift patterns are compared with respect to reliability and workload balancing by means of stochastic simulation and thus support the selection decision.

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