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1443. A study of flexibility and the chaining principle in the mid-term nurse scheduling problem
Invited abstract in session TD-15: Nurse rostering, stream OR in Health Services (ORAHS).
Tuesday, 14:30-16:00Room: 18 (building: 116)
Authors (first author is the speaker)
| 1. | Diego Fiorotto
|
| Centro de Pesquisa Operacional, Universidade Estadual de Campinas - FCA/UNICAMP | |
| 2. | Maria Paula Padilla
|
| Unicamp | |
| 3. | Karim MartÃnez
|
| ExPretio Technologies |
Abstract
The scheduling of personnel is a common problem that healthcare institutions frequently face worldwide. It consists of assigning nurses to shifts to satisfy a series of constraints relative to the workforce's skills, employee preferences and legal regulations. The current healthcare landscape, characterized by rising demand and a decreasing workforce, together with the effect that scheduling has over aspects like costs, turnovers, and job satisfaction, has become a great motivation for studying this problem. Cross-training, which consists of training nurses to cover additional units that require distinct skills, has been studied in different sectors from manufacturing to healthcare as a strategy to add flexibility to the healthcare systems and improve its responsiveness. In this paper, we study existing forms to include this type of flexibility and propose a mathematical formulation to incorporate it. Computational experiments over different scenarios show that the proposed extensions are functional and can produce solutions for the mid-term nurse scheduling problem. From the experiments, we derive some interesting insights about cross-training flexibility. First, our results show that it is more beneficial to invest in intensity, which is the number of cross-trained nurses, than investing in breadth, i.e., the number of additional units a nurse is trained to. Furthermore, there is a trade-off between flexibility and the amount of dedicated working time for each unit.
Keywords
- Programming, Integer
- Scheduling
- Mathematical Programming
Status: accepted
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