The nurse scheduling problem in real-life

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to study the scheduling process for two types of nursing teams, regular teams from care units and the float team that covers for shortages in the hospital. When managers address this problem, they either use a manual approach or have to invest in expensive commercial tool. We propose a simple heuristic approach, flexible and easy enough to be implemented on spreadsheets, and requiring almost no investment. The approach leads to streamlined process and higher-quality schedules for nurses. The multi-objective model and heuristics are presented, and additional analysis is performed to compare the performance of the approach. We show that our approach compares very well with an optimization software (CPLEX solver) and may be implemented at no cost. It addresses the lack of choice between either manual solution method or a commercial package at a high cost.