LinkedIn·Thursday, 20 August 2026·6d ago
False positives are easy to identify. False negatives are not. For example, in a large group, presume you want all women to collect a free…
Geoffrey De Smet
CTO Timefold - APIs for scheduling and routing optimization, powered by our open source solver.
False positives are easy to identify.
False negatives are not.
For example, in a large group, presume you want all women to collect a free gift.
A man that collects a gift will stick out like a sore thumb.
The false positive is easy to detect.
But a woman not collecting her gift won’t be so easy to notice.
The false negative is hard to detect.
The same applies to automated scheduling.
False positives are easily spotted.
Yet, most false negatives go undetected.
They silently drain money from your company, with their suboptimal schedules.
Try it yourself:
In the shift schedule below, each shift is assigned to an employee.
The shifts have required skills, and the employees have such skills.
The solver optimized the schedule, but the model implementation suffers from two bugs.
Can you find the false positive?
… and the false negative?
#OperationsResearch
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