Publishing is the act of taking a planned schedule and delivering it to the employees, freezing it in the process.

• Publishing usually happens once per week, on a fixed day
• Publishing happens a number of weeks in advance, for example 3 or 6 weeks in advance.
  • This allows the employees to organize their social lives accordingly.
• Publishing is a manual action: a button to push
  • Before publishing, the user wants to see and approve the schedule he's publishing
    • If he doesn't like OptaPlanner's plan, he might do manual changes, or change the constraint weights.
• Publishing is independent from rotation
  • Except that the number of days published is also the number of days added based on the rotation (starting from the rotation dayOffset we ended with last time), because we strongly prefer to keep the number of days in the planning window fixed.
• Does a published shift change?
  • A published shift, is a shift in the future (not historic) that is already published to the employees.
  • A published (nor a historic) shift does not change by optaplanner's normal solving
  • The manager can manually change a publish shift. For example if someone calls in sick.
    • Later phase: But the manager will be able to ask optaplanner to deal with it too, with non-disruptive replanning. This is not optaplanner's normal solving.
    • Non-disruptive replanning = normal solving, but ad hoc and with an extra constraint to minimize impact on other employees while still attaining a feasible solution (no hard constraints broken).