Rotating Workforce Scheduling in MiniZinc

I know a couple of people who work these kinds of shifts, and a major headache is trading shifts so that people can attend life events. If you could program that into this you could have a pretty interesting product.

Younger me would jump on that problem. The issue, of course, is that by the time you're making allowances for life events, trading favors, etc. the problem isn't technical anymore.

That is more the area of workforce management systems, and they are really big business.

I’ve previously tried starting a scheduling company, and even when one has a product that in testing shows that it would save the potential customers lots of money, it is really hard to gain traction.

Scheduling optimization is everywhere. From project management and shift scheduling to even NFL game programming.

There are a ton of players in the market that they cater to specific use case.

The issue is that there are always domain-specific nuances that a generic solver does not capture. Someone needs to encode them.