Prof. Sanja Petrovic, PhD
Division of Operations Management and Information Systems
Nottingham University Business School
Jubilee Campus, Wollaton Road
Nottingham, UK
e-mail: sanja.petrovic@nottingham.ac.uk
webpage: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/business/people/pszsxp.phtml
Title of the invited lecture: Well-being in personnel scheduling (The EURO plenary)
Author: Sanja Petrovic (The EURO plenary)
The research presented in this talk is motivated by the findings of employee well-being at work and especially of the effect of shift working and different shift patterns on employee well-being. These research results are mostly generated in the field of occupational medicine. The aim of our research is to bring the issue of employee well-being to the Operational Research rostering community. The presented research and insights provided from case studies are a joint work between OR academics and OR practitioners. An overview of well-being literature will be presented. This will be followed by a description of the well-being measures that we propose to be included in the objective function while generating a roster. These measures include work-life balance measures, Fatigue and Risk indices, and compliance with Health and Safety Executive (HSE) guidelines. As an experimental environment, we used three case studies of personnel scheduling, which are of very different nature: scheduling of fixed shift patterns, nurse rostering, and cyclic scheduling of flexible shifts in a call-centre service industry. The aim was to investigate to what extent employee well-being could be improved while maintaining high performance of rosters.
Keywords: personnel scheduling, well-being measures, fatigue, risk, case studies
Short CV:
Sanja Petrovic is a Professor of Operational Research (OR) in Nottingham University Business School, UK. She has conducted and led multi-disciplinary research into development of models, heuristics and algorithms for a variety of real-world optimisation and scheduling problems, including radiotherapy planning, scheduling of patients, employee timetabling, production scheduling, vehicle routing problems and university timetabling. Her research areas include optimisation methods and meta-heuristics, case-based reasoning, multicriteria decision making, data-mining, and fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic. Sanja has been the principal and co-investigator on projects mostly funded by Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and Technology Strategy Board. Sanja is a President-f the Operational Research Society UK, in the period 2025-2026. Sanja was a Vice-president of the UK OR Society in two terms (2013-2018), Chair of the Committee of Professors of OR in the UK (COPIOR) 2018 – 2021, and a Co-ordinator of the EURO (European Association of OR Societies) Working group on Automated Timetabling since 2006. She was a guest co-editor for special issues of the European Journal of Operational Research (EJOR), Journal of Scheduling and Annals of Operations Research. She is a Member of the International Advisory Board of the IMA Journal of Management Mathematics, Associate Editor of the Journal of Scheduling and a member of the Editorial Board of the Yugoslav Journal of Operations Research (YUJOR). She was Chair of the UK OR conference – OR53, held in Nottingham in 2011. She has published around 60 papers in international scientific journals and 30 book chapters and has supervised 19 PhD students to completion. Sanja was included in the prestigious Stanford University Top 2% Scientists Ranking in 2023.