Track: Decision Sciences

Abstract

Doctor scheduling is a complex, costly and time consuming exercise. A constraint satisfaction and penalty minimisation scheduling model that aims to meet all the hard constraints and minimises the cost of violating the soft constraints was developed to solve the doctor scheduling problem. The user inputs the total number of doctors to be scheduled, the maximum penalty to be met, and the minimum number of doctors to be assigned per shift. The algorithm creates a schedule that is checked against all the constraints. The total schedule penalty associated with constraint violations should be less than or equal to the user input penalty. If this condition is met the schedule is produced as the final and near optimal solution. The model managed to create a near optimal schedule with minimal rule violations; however it is very difficult to produce a schedule with no rule violations at all. This is shown by the amount of computational time required to create a zero penalty schedule, hours or even days are required to create a zero penalty schedule. The system creates a schedule for a short period of time (weekly schedule) in order to promote flexibility; however such a system does not promote fairness. Fairness has been achieved through the creation of a cyclic schedule with rotation. The scheduling period of the cyclic schedule with rotation is equal to the total number of doctors being scheduled. The system managed to create a streamlined and flexible working environment, and it also helped improve the quality of healthcare being provided to the public by ensuring that at least one doctor is available per shift. An optimisation protocol can be incorporated in to the system in order to reduce the search space and get the best optimal schedule since it is possible to get many schedules under the same user defined parameters.