title: A heuristic approach to nurse scheduling in hospital units with non-stationary, urgent demand, and a fixed staff size.
abstract: We present a practical approach to personnel scheduling problems arising in hospital units with demand that is of an urgent nature, cannot be backlogged, and is highly dependent on the time of day. A simple rounding heuristic is combined with a simulated annealing algorithm to obtain near-optimal solutions to large linear integer programming models of these personnel scheduling problems in a reasonable amount of time on a personal computer. The models are designed to complement the current state-of-the-art of commercially available hospital staff scheduling systems.
authors.affiliation: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
authors.forename: M W
authors.initials: MW
authors.lastname: Isken
authors.forename: W M
authors.initials: WM
authors.lastname: Hancock
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D004636:Emergency Service, Hospital; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D009741:Nursing Staff, Hospital / Q000600:supply & distribution*; D010561:Personnel Staffing and Scheduling; D010562:Personnel Staffing and Scheduling Information Systems; D016528:Postanesthesia Nursing; D011997:Recovery Room; D000078329:Workforce