TY - JOUR
T1 - A two-stage heuristic approach for nurse scheduling problem
T2 - a case study in an emergency department
AU - Wong, T. C.
AU - Xu, M.
AU - Chin, K. S.
PY - 2014/11
Y1 - 2014/11
N2 - Nurse scheduling is a critical issue in the management of emergency department. Under the intense work environment, it is imperative to make quality nurse schedules in a most cost and time effective way. To this end, a spreadsheet-based two-stage heuristic approach is proposed for the nurse scheduling problem (NSP) in a local emergency department. First, an initial schedule satisfying all hard constraints is generated by the simple shift assignment heuristic. Second, the sequential local search algorithm is employed to improve the initial schedules by taking soft constraints (nurse preferences) into account. The proposed approach is benchmarked with the existing approach and 0-1 programming. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it is one of a few studies in nurse scheduling literature using heuristic approach to generate nurse schedules based on Excel spreadsheet. Therefore, users with little knowledge on linear programming and computer sciences can operate and change the scheduling algorithms easily. Second, while most studies on nurse scheduling are situated in hospitals, this paper attempts to bridge the research gap by investigating the NSP in the emergency department where the scheduling rules are much more restrictive due to the intense and dynamic work environment. Overall, our approach generates satisfactory schedules with higher level of user-friendliness, efficiency, and flexibility of rescheduling as compared to both the existing approach and 0-1 programming.
AB - Nurse scheduling is a critical issue in the management of emergency department. Under the intense work environment, it is imperative to make quality nurse schedules in a most cost and time effective way. To this end, a spreadsheet-based two-stage heuristic approach is proposed for the nurse scheduling problem (NSP) in a local emergency department. First, an initial schedule satisfying all hard constraints is generated by the simple shift assignment heuristic. Second, the sequential local search algorithm is employed to improve the initial schedules by taking soft constraints (nurse preferences) into account. The proposed approach is benchmarked with the existing approach and 0-1 programming. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it is one of a few studies in nurse scheduling literature using heuristic approach to generate nurse schedules based on Excel spreadsheet. Therefore, users with little knowledge on linear programming and computer sciences can operate and change the scheduling algorithms easily. Second, while most studies on nurse scheduling are situated in hospitals, this paper attempts to bridge the research gap by investigating the NSP in the emergency department where the scheduling rules are much more restrictive due to the intense and dynamic work environment. Overall, our approach generates satisfactory schedules with higher level of user-friendliness, efficiency, and flexibility of rescheduling as compared to both the existing approach and 0-1 programming.
KW - 0-1 programming
KW - emergency department
KW - excel
KW - heuristics
KW - nurse scheduling
KW - case study
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84902294430&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.cor.2014.05.018
DO - 10.1016/j.cor.2014.05.018
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84902294430
SN - 0305-0548
VL - 51
SP - 99
EP - 110
JO - Computers & Operations Research
JF - Computers & Operations Research
ER -