1630. A sequence-based approach to shift planning in Swiss healthcare institutions
Invited abstract in session MC-11: Scheduling and queuing in healthcare, stream OR in Healthcare (ORAHS).
Monday, 12:30-14:00Room: Clarendon SR 1.03
Authors (first author is the speaker)
| 1. | Maude Bersier
|
| Department of Business Administration, University of Bern | |
| 2. | Philipp Baumann
|
| Department of Business Administration, University of Bern |
Abstract
Shift planning is a key task in healthcare because it affects both operational efficiency and the working conditions of employees. Improving employee working conditions has become a key focus to address healthcare personnel shortages in various countries. In this work, we tackle a real-world shift planning problem originating from Switzerland that consists of assigning shifts to employees subject to operational and employee-specific requirements. While the operational requirements align with established shift planning problems, the employee-specific requirements extend those commonly studied in the literature by including a large number of sequence-based constraints. Such constraints apply to sequences of consecutive shifts and are intended to improve the work patterns of employees. Because of these sequence-based constraints, established approaches require modifications to be applicable, which reduces their effectiveness. Therefore, we propose a new two-step approach. In the first stage, we generate sequences of shifts while considering all sequence-based constraints. In the second stage, we use integer programming to assign sequences to employees subject to the remaining constraints. To assess the performance of our approach, we conduct an experimental analysis based on real-world instances from Swiss health care institutions.
Keywords
- Health Care
- Combinatorial Optimization
- Mathematical Programming
Status: accepted
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