🔒 shifts are used by the automatic cover — you can re-time them but not remove them. Any shift you add here can be placed on the roster by hand (click a day cell after planning). The backing key is shifts.
These come from the industrial agreement. Changing them may make a legal roster impossible — the planner will tell you which rules clash.
Rota AI reads the shift catalogue, the cover the ward needs, and every rule in the industrial agreement — rest breaks, night limits, weekend frequency, hour caps — then searches millions of possible rosters to find one that meets every legal rule while keeping hours close to target and sharing the load fairly.
Create up to five runs, each with its own constraints — team size, priorities, staff requests, leave and start date. Solve them side by side and use Compare runs to read the trade-offs.
A separate, independent checker re-verifies each finished roster minute-by-minute. Anything it finds appears under Safety & legal checks — green means fully compliant.