This web program is intended to demonstrate scheduling several hundred short workshifts within the constraints of the workers schedules. Each worker enters his/her schedule into the the computer system through the internet; the "work manager" enters available workshifts into the system, and the computer system aids the work manager in selecting optimal shifts for the available workers.

While the problem of scheduling the workers optimally is known to be mathematically difficult, heuristics can be used to help the work manager select schedules which meets the organizational goal of 100% deployment and the individual goal of having a work assignment and shift to his/her liking.

The symbol above is that  which is used to denote a cooperative such as the student coops on which this program was built. Organizations such as the UC Berkeley Coop and the UCLA Co-op have used systems similar to this one to assign workshifts to workers for years.

If you would like to try out the scheduling, please feel free to create an account, get a deposit number, enter your schedule, and try your luck at finding a suitable  workshift!  (You don't really have to do it). Since this is only a prototype, only a few dozen workshifts and a few hundred randomly assigned workers schedules are available in the data. In a real situation, many more workshifts would be available for the workers, perhaps exhausting the availability of workers.