Scheduling Employees in Quebec’s Liquor Stores with Integer Programming
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The SAQ (in French, Société des alcools du Québec) is a public corporation of the Province of Quebec responsible for distributing and selling alcohol-based products in its territory through a large network of more than 400 stores and warehouses. Every week, the SAQ has to schedule more than 3,000 employees. Until 2002, it handled this process manually, incurring estimated expenses of $1,300,000 (CAN). I developed a solution engine that interacts with a Web-based database system developed in house to produce the desired schedules. This solution engine implements an integer-programming (IP) model using ILOG Concert Technology and solves the IP formulation with ILOG CPLEX. The project has contributed to increasing the efficiency of the organization by reducing the costs of producing the schedules and by improving the SAQ’s management of human resources. Overall, the SAQ estimates that automated scheduling has saved over $1,000,000 (CAN) annually.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it