Track: Operations Research

Abstract

The nurse scheduling problem is among the most widely studied problem in literature. Nurse scheduling is concerned about allocating nurses to conduct specific tasks. The various objectives and constraints of this problem that changes from country to country and from hospital to hospital makes it very hard to solve. Furthermore, lack of resources makes this scheduling task very challenging. Many hospitals are still executing nurses scheduling manually, which is indeed a cumbersome and time consuming task. This, however, may lead to high chances and risks of not fulfilling all rules set by the hospital. Therefore, this article presents a goal programming framework model to scheduling nurses working at the emergency department with the objective to increase fairness in shifts distribution. The experimental results highlights the importance of developing heuristic or meta-heuristic approaches to solve such NP-hard problem.