AI-Powered Fair Shift Scheduling System
MSc Dissertation

Manual shift rotas at hospitality and retail sites routinely produced unfair distributions of unpopular shifts, driving staff dissatisfaction and turnover.
Case study — role, decisions, result
Role
Sole researcher and developer — problem framing, forecasting model, scheduling engine, and UX validation.
Key decisions
- Used Prophet to forecast demand and staffing needs from historical shift data rather than relying on fixed rosters.
- Built a custom constraint-based scheduling engine instead of an off-the-shelf solver, because existing solvers could not hold the real fairness and availability constraints gathered from staff.
- Designed the scheduling UI in Figma and validated the concept with a staff survey before building the working prototype.
Result
Delivered a working system that generates rotas balancing forecasted demand against fairness constraints, validated against real staff feedback rather than assumptions.



