Patent ID: 7155399

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for generating a schedule for a plurality of employees with varying skill sets for a time period, wherein the plurality of employees have varying overlapping skill sets that enable them to perform various tasks, and wherein employees are shared across tasks within the time period, the method comprising: receiving a plurality of user inputs to a scheduling program, including a number of employee designations each of which refers to a unique employee, and a number of skill sets each of which corresponds to one of the employee designations; during the method for generating the schedule, determining an effect on the schedule of an incremental change to the plurality of user inputs, including: receiving a user input that changes the number of employee designations by indicating at least one changed employee, estimating an effect of the at least one changed employee on effective staffing levels for each of various tasks, wherein the estimating uses as an input a skill set associated with the at least one changed employee, determining whether to simulate the schedule based at least in part on an adaptive algorithm, and generating estimated effective staffing levels for each of the various tasks; and dividing the method such that the method is performed on multiple parallel processors comprising, dividing a schedule into time intervals such that a schedule for each of the time intervals is processed by a different processor.