http://meetings2.informs.org/wordpress/philadelphia/2015/11/04/optimal-student-volunteer-scheduling-for-the-2015-informs-annual-meeting/
“When we sat down to begin scheduling student volunteers for this year’s Annual Meeting, we recognized an opportunity to use OR methods to make the task more manageable. We realized that the problem consisted of scheduling 59 students across eight shifts (two shifts per day, four days), with each student required to work either one or two five-hour shifts (morning or afternoon). Since student volunteers are placed throughout the conference facilities, we decided to schedule students into the 74 “shift-location” combinations rather than simply assign a block of students into each shift.
A Doodle poll was set up to obtain student availability. Each student was asked to indicate five out of the eight shifts during which they were available. The availability data was translated into a cost matrix where the cost was zero if a student was available and a cost of 1,000,000 if a student was unavailable for a certain shift. The objective was to minimize the total cost of the assigned schedule, thereby creating a feasible schedule that did not assign any students to shift(s) for which they were unavailable.
The problem was set up and solved in MS Excel. The tool used was COIN-OR’s Open Solver add-in for MS Excel…”