A Guaranteed-Accuracy Round-off Algorithm for Cyclic Scheduling and Set Covering

The problem of cyclic staff scheduling is solved by a linear programming round-off heuristic for which a bound on the absolute error is established. The quality of the bound is independent of the resource requirements. Moreover, the quality of the bound improves as the matrix of resource availability approximates the property of consecutive ones. The appropriateness of the heuristic is further established by showing that cyclic staff scheduling is NP-complete.