INTERDIP - An Interactive Constraint Based Nurse Scheduler

In every hospital a duty roster for the nursing staa of each ward must be created each month. The roster has to take into account several requirements such as minimal allocation of a station, legal regulations and wishes of the personnel. This planning is very complex and is still done manually. INTERDIP is an advanced industrial prototype that supports semi-automatic creation of such rosters. Using constraint based programming, INTERDIP imitates certain aspects of manual planning. With INTERDIP a roster can be created interactively within some minutes instead of by hand some hours. Additionally, it mostly produces better results. INTERDIP was developed in collaboration with Siemens Nixdorf. It was presented at the Systems'98 Computer exhibition in Munich and several companies have inquired to market our system.

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