EURO 2024 Copenhagen
Abstract Submission

EURO-Online login

1424. A metaheuristic approach for an integrated nurse routing and re-rostering problem

Invited abstract in session WB-10: Integrated planning in healthcare, stream OR in Health Services (ORAHS).

Wednesday, 10:30-12:00
Room: 11 (building: 116)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Anisha Maharani
HEC Liège - Management School, University of Liège
2. Yasemin Arda
HEC Liège - Management School of the University of Liège
3. Véronique François
HEC Management School, University of Liège

Abstract

Hospital-at-home (HaH) provides short-term acute care to patients at home for a condition that otherwise would require inpatient admission. Having acute illnesses, the patient mix fluctuates. Furthermore, more accurate information about resource availability becomes known with time. Thus, operational plans have to be established taking into account this updated information.
Given a baseline roster and patient requirements, simultaneous operational decisions on patient admission, nurse assignment, visit scheduling, and potential roster updates are taken for a weekly horizon, yielding a combined nurse routing and re-rostering problem. The integrated problem incorporates complex real-world characteristics related to patient admission, routing, rostering, and re-rostering constraints while ensuring continuity across consecutive planning horizons.
A lexicographic objective function first maximizes the number of patients admitted to HaH and second minimizes the total working duration of the nurses. This is achieved by employing destroy and repair strategies based on a large neighborhood search. A guided local search is embedded to modify nurse rosters to further improve the solution. Infeasible solutions are allowed to be explored by relaxing time windows, rostering, and re-rostering constraints.
The first results obtained by this algorithm will be presented, followed by a discussion about several challenges in balancing the different objectives of the studied problem.

Keywords

Status: accepted

Back to the list of papers