A Greedy Double Swap Heuristic for Nurse Scheduling

Publication Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

6-2012

Abstract

One of the key challenges of nurse scheduling problem (NSP) is the number of constraints placed on preparing the timetable, both from the regulatory requirements as well as the patients’ demand for the appropriate nursing care specialists. In addition, the preferences of the nursing staffs related to their work schedules add another dimension of complexity. Most solutions proposed for solving nurse scheduling involve the use of mathematical programming and generally considers only the hard constraints. However, the psychological needs of the nurses are ignored and this resulted in subsequent interventions by the nursing staffs to remedy any deficiency and often results in last minute changes to the schedule. In this paper, we present a staff preference optimization framework solved with a greedy double swap heuristic. The heuristic yields good performance in speed at solving the problem. The heuristic is simple and we will demonstrate its performance by implementing it on open source spreadsheet software.

Keywords

Nursing scheduling, Mathematical programming, Swapping algorithm, Optimization framework

Discipline

Computer Sciences | Health and Medical Administration | Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering

Publication

Management Science Letters

Volume

2

Issue

6

First Page

2001

Last Page

2010

ISSN

1923-9335

Identifier

10.5267/j.msl.2012.06.021

Publisher

Growing Science

Additional URL

http://dx.doi.org/10.5267/j.msl.2012.06.021

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