Customs officers' cyclical scheduling using : goal programming / Siti Khairunnisa Mohd Roslan

Scheduling is an important process for every workplace. Currently, the customs
officers’ schedule-maker at the Royal Malaysian Customs Department (RMCD) in
Bayan Lepas, Penang constructs the schedule manually, which is a very inefficient
way. Thus, this study will help them arrange schedules in an easier way with less effort
and more efficient. The major objective of this study is to build a cyclical work
schedule model for customs officers using goal programming. The minor objectives
are to develop a new schedule that is fair and considers the working policies and
preferences of customs officers, and to ease schedule-makers’ task of distributing
schedules. This goal programming method considers working policies as hard
constraints and the customs officers’ preferences as soft constraints. The LINGO 17.0
software was used to run the model. A 12-day 12 customs officers’ schedule was built
to ease the process of developing the cyclical schedule. The built schedule will then
be extended to cover the required total number of 24 customs officers in the
department. The result obtained is in the form of an optimal solution where all the
study’s goals were achieved. The model has generated a balanced work schedule for
the workers which satisfy their preferences while also fulfilling the working
regulations of the customs department. The customs officers will be separated into four
different teams which consist of six members each, and six schedule sets will be
applied for each customs officer in each team. The schedule will rotate continuously
until all of them get to experience all six sets of their team members’ schedule. The
schedule will then be cycled again from the starting schedule set after completed 72-
days planning period. Other constraints such as public holidays and level of staff’s
skills can be incorporating into this model for further research.