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A new approach to working set generation for personnel scheduling problems is presented. In full-time (FT) and mixed-workforce (MW) experiments, the schedules in the working sets from the use of 2-phase heuristic labor scheduling solution procedures are generated. The solution procedures were implemented on a 386 microcomputer and did not require the specification of the size of the working sets in advance. In the FT experiment, the general set-covering formulations (GscF) associated with the produced working sets were solved with integer programming. The new working set procedure yielded optimal integer solutions for all 36 test problems in the FT experiment. Owing to the size and complexity of the problem data in the MW experiment, the GSCFs associated with the working sets were solved with linear programming, and heuristic rounding procedures were applied to obtain feasible integer solutions.