US Patent 8744889 Cost based employee scheduling

A method for managing a shift schedule, involving obtaining employee data for employees, a payroll constraint for a time period, and an employer requirement for the shift schedule, and collecting an employee availability schedule from each employee. The method further involves generating shift schedules based on the payroll constraint, employee data, employer requirement, and employee availability schedules, determining a payroll budget associated with each shift schedule, ranking the shift schedules based on the payroll budget to obtain a ranked list of shift schedules, and presenting the ranked list of shift schedules to an employer.