Improving Physician Schedules by Leveraging Equalization: Cases from Hospitals in U.S.

In this paper, we consider physician scheduling problems originating from a medical staff scheduling service provider based in the United States. Creating a physician schedule is a complex task. An optimal schedule must balance a number of goals including adequately staffing required assignments for quality patient care, adhering to a unique set of rules that depend on hospital and medical specialties, and maintaining a work-life balance for physicians. We study various types of physician and hospital requirements with different priorities, including equalization constraints to ensure that each provider will receive approximately the same number of a specified shift over a given time period. A major challenge involves ensuring an equal distribution of workload among physicians, with the end goal of producing a schedule that will be perceived by physicians as fair while still meeting all other requirements for the group. As the number of such equalization constraints increases, the physician scheduling optimization problem becomes more complex and it requires more time to find an optimal schedule. We begin by constructing mathematical models to formulate the problem requirements, and then demonstrate the benefits of a polyhedral study on a relaxation of the physician scheduling problem that includes equalization constraints. A branch-and-cut algorithm using valid inequalities derived from the relaxation problem shows that the quality of the schedules with respect to the soft constraints is notably better. An example problem from a hospitalist department is discussed in detail, and improvements for other schedules representing different specialties are also presented

Shift rostering using decomposition: assign weekend shifts first

This paper introduces a shift rostering problem that surprisingly has not been studied in literature: the weekend shift rostering problem. It is motivated by our experience that employees’ shift preferences predominantly focus on the weekends, since many social activities happen during weekends. The Weekend Rostering Problem (WRP) addresses the rostering of weekend shifts, for which we design a problem specific heuristic. We consider the WRP as the first phase of the shift rostering problem. To complete the shift roster, the second phase assigns the weekday shifts using an existing algorithm. We discuss effects of this two-phase approach both on the weekend shift roster and on the roster as a whole. We demonstrate that our first-phase heuristic is effective both on generated instances and real-life instances. For situations where the weekend shift roster is one of the key determinants of the quality of the complete roster, our two-phase approach shows to be effective when incorporated in a commercially implemented algorithm

Development and implementation of a computer-aided method for planning resident shifts in a hospital

Ce mémoire propose une formulation pour le problème de confection d'horaire pour résidents, un problème peu étudiée dans la litérature. Les services hospitaliers mentionnés dans ce mémoire sont le service de pédiatrie du CHUL (Centre Hospitalier de l'Université Laval) et le service des urgences de l'Hôpital Enfant-Jésus à Québec. La contribution principale de ce mémoîre est la proposition d'un cadre d'analyse pour l’analyse de techniques manuelles utilisées dans des problèmes de confection d'horaires, souvent décrits comme des problèmes d'optimisation très complexes. Nous montrons qu'il est possible d'utiliser des techniques manuelles pour établir un ensemble réduit de contraintes sur lequel la recherche d’optimisation va se focaliser. Les techniques utilisées peuvent varier d’un horaire à l’autre et vont déterminer la qualité finale de l’horaire. La qualité d’un horaire est influencée par les choix qu’un planificateur fait dans l’utilisation de techniques spécifiques; cette technique reflète alors la perception du planificateur de la notion qualité de l’horaire. Le cadre d’analyse montre qu'un planificateur est capable de sélectionner un ensemble réduit de contraintes, lui permettant d’obtenir des horaires de très bonne qualité. Le fait que l'approche du planificateur est efficace devient clair lorsque ses horaires sont comparés aux solutions heuristiques. Pour ce faire, nous avons transposées les techniques manuelles en un algorithme afin de comparer les résultats avec les solutions manuelles. Mots clés: Confection d’horaires, Confection d’horaires pour résidents, Creation manuelle d’horaires, Heuristiques de confection d’horaires, Méthodes de recherche localeThis thesis provides a problem formulation for the resident scheduling problem, a problem on which very little research has been done. The hospital departments mentioned in this thesis are the paediatrics department of the CHUL (Centre Hospitalier de l’Université Laval) and the emergency department of the Hôpital Enfant-Jésus in Québec City. The main contribution of this thesis is the proposal of a framework for the analysis of manual techniques used in scheduling problems, often described as highly constrained optimisation problems. We show that it is possible to use manual scheduling techniques to establish a reduced set of constraints to focus the search on. The techniques used can differ from one schedule type to another and will determine the quality of the final solution. Since a scheduler manually makes the schedule, the techniques used reflect the scheduler’s notion of schedule quality. The framework shows that a scheduler is capable of selecting a reduced set of constraints, producing manual schedules that often are of very high quality. The fact that a scheduler’s approach is efficient becomes clear when his schedules are compared to heuristics solutions. We therefore translated the manual techniques into an algorithm so that the scheduler’s notion of schedule quality was used for the local search and show the results that were obtained. Key words: Timetable scheduling, Resident scheduling, Manual scheduling, Heuristic schedule generation, Local search method

A Constraint Programming and Hybrid Approach to Nurse Rostering Problems

This paper describes a decision support methodologies for nurse rostering problem in a modern hospital environment. In particular, it is very important to efficiently utilise time and effort, to evenly balance the workload among people and to attempt to satisfy personnel preference. We presented a complete model to formulate all the complex real-world constraints, solution approach and Hybrid approaches to nurse rostering problem. DOI: 10.17762/ijritcc2321-8169.15037

"You have to get wet to learn how to swim" applied to bridging the gap between research into personnel scheduling and its implementation in practice

Personnel scheduling problems have attracted research interests for several decades. They have been considerably changed over time, accommodating a variety of constraints related to legal and organisation requirements, part-time staff, flexible hours of staff, staff preferences, etc. This led to a myriad of approaches developed for solving personnel scheduling problems including optimisation, meta-heuristics, artificial intelligence, decision-support, and also hybrids of these approaches. However, this still does not imply that this research has a large impact on practice and that state-of-the art models and algorithms are widely in use in organisations. One can find a reasonably large number of software packages that aim to assist in personnel scheduling. A classification of this software based on its purpose will be proposed, accompanied with a discussion about the level of support that this software offers to schedulers. A general conclusion is that the available software, with some exceptions, does not benefit from the wealth of developed models and methods. The remaining of the paper will provide insights into some characteristics of real-world scheduling problems that, in the author’s opinion, have not been given a due attention in the personnel scheduling research community yet and which could contribute to the enhancement of the implementation of research results in practice. Concluding remarks are that in order to bridge the gap that still exists between research into personnel scheduling and practice, we need to engage more with schedulers in practice and also with software developers; one may say we need to get wet if we want to learn how to swim

A metaheuristics approach to the nurse rostering problem

Health care providers are affected by problems of personnel costs. Usually, the generation of rosters is a hand-made and time-consuming task and does not always comply with the legislation and the internal rules. The article presents an approach to roster generation for nursing technicians according to legal and internal restrictions and in a satisfactory period of time. It is also designed to give employees a higher level of satisfaction concerning their day off preferences and a fair distribution of unpopular shifts.The article’s proposal is to develop a hybrid system formed by a Tabu Search metaheuristic combined with a genetic algorithm. Experiments were carried out with artificial test cases based on real data. The results obtained were satisfactory, showing the feasibility of the solution in all tests performed.Key words: rostering problem, tabu search, genetic algorithm, hybrid systems