The Nurse Scheduling Problem in Real-Life

The aim of this paper is to study the scheduling process for two types of nursing teams, regular teams from care units and the float team that covers for shortages in the hospital. When managers address this problem, they either use a manual approach or have to invest in expensive commercial tool. We propose a simple heuristic approach, flexible and easy enough to be implemented on spreadsheets, and requiring almost no investment. The approach leads to streamlined process and higher-quality schedules for nurses. The multi-objective model and heuristics are presented, and additional analysis is performed to compare the performance of the approach. We show that our approach compares very well with an optimization software (CPLEX solver) and may be implemented at no cost. It addresses the lack of choice between either manual solution method or a commercial package at a high cost.

[1]  Mario Vanhoucke,et al.  An electromagnetic meta-heuristic for the nurse scheduling problem , 2007, J. Heuristics.

[2]  Efthymios Housos,et al.  Hybrid optimization techniques for the workshift and rest assignment of nursing personnel , 2000, Artif. Intell. Medicine.

[3]  J. Welton,et al.  Hospital nursing costs, billing, and reimbursement. , 2006, Nursing economic$.

[4]  Uwe Aickelin,et al.  An Indirect Genetic Algorithm for a Nurse Scheduling Problem , 2004, Comput. Oper. Res..

[5]  Alistair M. Clark,et al.  Nurse rescheduling with shift preferences and minimal disruption , 2011 .

[6]  Edmund K. Burke,et al.  A scatter search methodology for the nurse rostering problem , 2010, J. Oper. Res. Soc..

[7]  Sanja Petrovic,et al.  METAHEURISTICS FOR HANDLING TIME INTERVAL COVERAGE CONSTRAINTS IN NURSE SCHEDULING , 2006, Appl. Artif. Intell..

[8]  Kwai-Sang Chin,et al.  A two-stage heuristic approach for nurse scheduling problem: A case study in an emergency department , 2014, Comput. Oper. Res..

[9]  Edmund K. Burke,et al.  Novel Metaheuristic Approaches to Nurse Rostering Problems in Belgian Hospitals , 2004, Handbook of Scheduling.

[10]  Kathryn A. Dowsland,et al.  Solving a nurse scheduling problem with knapsacks, networks and tabu search , 2000, J. Oper. Res. Soc..

[11]  Ebru Yilmaz,et al.  A Mathematical Programming Model for Scheduling of Nurses’ Labor Shifts , 2012, Journal of Medical Systems.

[12]  Erik Demeulemeester,et al.  Personnel scheduling: A literature review , 2013, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[13]  Steven Walczak,et al.  Nurse Scheduling: From Academia to Implementation or Not? , 2007, Interfaces.

[14]  Jacques A. Ferland,et al.  A Multi-objective Approach to Nurse Scheduling with both Hard and Soft Constraints , 1996 .

[15]  Viviane Gascon,et al.  Generalized Assignment Type Goal Programming Problem: Application to Nurse Scheduling , 2001, J. Heuristics.

[16]  J. Bard,et al.  Short-Term Nurse Scheduling in Response to Daily Fluctuations in Supply and Demand , 2005, Health care management science.

[17]  Mario Vanhoucke,et al.  New Computational Results for the Nurse Scheduling Problem: A Scatter Search Algorithm , 2006, EvoCOP.

[18]  Uwe Aickelin,et al.  An estimation of distribution algorithm with intelligent local search for rule-based nurse rostering , 2007, J. Oper. Res. Soc..

[19]  Jonathan F. Bard,et al.  Hospital-wide reactive scheduling of nurses with preference considerations , 2005 .

[20]  Jonathan F. Bard,et al.  Cyclic preference scheduling of nurses using a Lagrangian-based heuristic , 2007, J. Sched..