A CHIP Application... in Justice !

MOSAR is a powerful Decision Support Tool, developed in CHIP for prison staff planning at the French Ministry of Justice. Operational in 9 sites in France since mid 99, MOSAR has already helped the French Ministry of Justice to improve its prison staff organisation, respecting all the legal rules and specific needs of each site. With MOSAR, a complete planning is proposed within a few minutes, while by hand it would require around four weeks of tedious work.

Personal Planning

CHIP Application... for Prison Staff !

Typical Planning at the team level

Typical Planning at the individual level

Members of a team do not have the same work assignments all the time.
In some organisations, members of a team may not be on holiday at the same time.

MOSAR is a long-term Decision Support Tool designed to allow directors and personal representatives to improve prison staff organisation, respecting all the legal rules and daily work requirements, based on shifts (morning, afternoon, night, etc.).

The work force is split into functional groups with the same work organisation, and each group includes several teams. There may be up to 7 teams or 250 agents in a group.

Given a fully parameterised work cycle, a set of annual holiday dates, and a set of constraints on consecutive shift assignments, MOSAR will produce an annual timetable for each agent of the group.

In addition, MOSAR provides a number of decision-boards, showing per agent the hours worked, the number ofnights and weekends on duty, the bonus paid (for night, weekends and overtime).

MOSAR stands for Method for the Organisation of Service Adapted to Regions. The need for new working organisations was felt since several years due to the creation of new types of buildings. After end-users training in mid 1999, the MOSAR system is in operation in 9 regional centres.

Parameter setting of a work cycle: weekly cycle CH12

MOSAR benefits

Since the Planning is done very quickly with MOSAR, day-to-day simulation of work organisation becomes possible.

Each solution is compared with the others based on some particular social and economic factors such as: overtime bonus, number of nights and weekends worked over the whole year, etc.

Different types of benefits can be highlighted:

• generation of a planning in a few minutes when by hand it would require around four weeks,
• handling of personal preference and / or specific site constraints,
• global optimisation while satisfying all the needs and the legal constraints.

MOSAR at work

The end-user of MOSAR is the Regional Counsellor who helps directors to reorganise his site.

MOSAR is a stand-alone application, complete with modules such as:

• Work cycle editor, to edit the various parameters such as daily/weekly, the sequence of work shifts, and the number of hours of each shift.
• Organisation of the site into one or more groups, each group being parameterised according to the desired organisation, for holiday.
• Visualising the generated timetable, with the possibility of making changes interactively. Hence the timetable can be hand-optimised to take into account various ways of according day off and bonus calculation. The accumulated working times are updated immediately.
• Export timetables to spreadsheets.

MOSAR Rules

• Shifts allowed before annual holiday
• Shifts allowed after annual holiday
• Assignment of «variable shift» (night shift, extra rest)

Work Cycle Parameters

• Holiday taken by whole team or individually
• Holiday organised based on multiple teams
• Extra rest assignment before or after holiday

D A P
The Department of Prison Administration is one of six departments of the Ministry of Justice.