Medical student scheduling plays an important role in medical education. Ineffective schedules can lead to workload imbalance and inequitable learning conditions for students. The problem becomes more severe in multi-campus medical schools, where clinical wards are located in multiple locations. To address this challenge, this article develops a multi-objective mixed integer programming model for medical student scheduling problems with a multi-campus scenario. The model incorporates three objectives: 1) maximizing workload alternation, 2) minimizing inter-group deviation, and 3) minimizing inter-campus travel. The model is solved using IBM ILOG CPLEX with a lexicographic goal programming approach to handle trade-offs among multiple objectives. Computational results demonstrate that prioritizing workload alternation produces a schedule that varies workload levels while maintaining fairness across student groups and acceptable levels of campus travel. The results also highlight the importance of objective prioritization in multi-objective clinical rotation scheduling and illustrate the model’s potential as a decision support tool for medical education schedulers.

Keywords

Medical student scheduling, Mixed integer programming, Workload balancing, Fairness, Multi-campus scheduling.