title: Algorithmic staff scheduling solutions
body: <p>At a gross level, the problem is simple: schedule an army of staff for one-person-per-day coverage, at any given day the staff is split into 3 pools, each staff has a vacation requirement, each staff has at most 2 shifts per week, etc.</p>
  
  <p>I'd hate to do this manually as it has been done at my organization for centuries. I'd love to do something cool like genetic algorithms (eg [1] <a href="http://www.sersc.org/journals/IJAST/vol14/1.pdf" rel="noreferrer">http://www.sersc.org/journals/IJAST/vol14/1.pdf</a>).</p>
  
  <p>Are there any reliable Open source / free alternatives out there? This also sounds like an optimization problem, can I fire up C++, R, etc to plug into some optimization library for this?</p>
  
  <p>thanks</p>