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Nurse Scheduling Using Mathematical Programming

Holmes E. Miller¹; William P. Pierskalla²; Gustave J. Rath²

¹ Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York · ² Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

This paper formulates the nurse-scheduling problem as one of selecting a configuration of nurse schedules that minimize an objective function that balances the trade-off between staffing coverage and schedule preferences of individual nurses, subject to certain feasibility constraints on the nurse schedules. The problem is solved by a cyclic coordinate descent algorithm. We present results pertaining to a six-month application to a particular hospital unit and draw comparisons between the algorithm and hospital-generated schedules.

DOI

10.1287/opre.24.5.857

Volume

24 (5)

Pages

857-870

Language

en

Export

BibTeX

Sources

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