RotaBot

Inspiration

As a General Manager, I spent hours every week creating staff rotas. Existing software still required managers to manually build schedules, leading to unnecessary labour costs, overstaffing, understaffing, and endless adjustments. I wanted to build a system that could generate the optimal rota automatically.

What it does

RotaBot uses mathematical optimisation and AI to generate legally compliant, demand-driven staff rotas in minutes. It balances employee availability, contracted hours, labour demand, skills, business rules, breaks, and legal constraints to produce an efficient schedule with minimal manual intervention.

How we built it

RotaBot's optimisation engine is powered by Google OR-Tools (CP-SAT), with a Python backend exposing a REST API. The frontend is built with Lovable and React, data is stored in Supabase, deployments run on Render and Vercel, and the staff mobile app is built using SwiftUI.

Challenges we ran into

Scheduling quickly becomes an extremely complex optimisation problem with thousands of constraints and millions of possible combinations. The biggest challenge was modelling real-world business rules while still allowing the solver to consistently find high-quality solutions within practical time limits.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

RotaBot is now used to generate live staff rotas at my workplace. It consistently matches staffing demand, ensures employees reach their contracted hours, reduces unnecessary labour spend, and has replaced manual rota creation for day-to-day scheduling.

What we learned

Building optimisation software is as much about understanding business operations as it is writing code. Every workplace has unique rules, and creating a flexible constraint engine proved far more valuable than hard-coding scheduling logic.

What's next for RotaBot

Our goal is to make workforce optimisation accessible to businesses of every size. Future work includes multi-site scheduling, forecasting, AI-powered staffing recommendations, payroll integration, and opening the platform to organisations beyond hospitality.

Built With

• obsession