A Methodology for Labor Scheduling in a Service Operating System

Bechtold, Stephen E.; Showalter, Michael J.

doi:10.1111/j.1540-5915.1987.tb01505.x

Cited by 56 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Research exploring the scheduling decisions is a widely studied area in the overall workforce management literature. In general, most scheduling research can be classified into three areas: shift scheduling (Buffa, Cosgrove, & Luce, 1976; Henderson & Berry, 1976; Thompson, 1990; Thompson, 1995a; Mason et al, 1998), days‐off scheduling (Tibrewala, Philippe, & Browne, 1972; Baker, 1974; Bechtold, 1981), and tour scheduling (Mabert & Watts, 1982; Bechtold & Showalter, 1987; Easton & Rossin, 1991a, 1991b; Jarrah, Bard, & deSilva, 1994). A smaller amount of research can be classified as tour assignment (Ritzman, Krajewski, & Showalter, 1976; Love & Hoey, 1990; Loucks & Jacobs, 1991).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reexamining the Nurse Scheduling Problem: Staffing Ratios and Nursing Shortages*

Wright¹,

Bretthauer²,

Côté³

2006

Decision Sciences

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Legislators at the state and national levels are addressing renewed concerns over the adequacy of hospital nurse staffing to provide quality care and ensure patient safety. At the same time, the well-known nursing shortage remains an ongoing problem. To address these issues, we reexamine the nurse scheduling problem and consider how recent health care legislation impacts nursing workforce management decisions. Specifically, we develop a scheduling model and perform computational experiments to evaluate how mandatory nurse-to-patient ratios and other policies impact schedule cost and schedule desirability (from the nurses' perspective). Our primary findings include the following: (i) nurse wage costs can be highly nonlinear with respect to changes in mandatory nurseto-patient ratios of the type being considered by legislators; (ii) the number of undesirable shifts can be substantially reduced without incurring additional wage cost; (iii) more desirable scheduling policies, such as assigning fewer weekends to each nurse, have only a small impact on wage cost; and (iv) complex policy statements involving both singleperiod and multiperiod service levels can sometimes be relaxed while still obtaining good schedules that satisfy the nurse-to-patient ratio requirements. The findings in this article suggest that new directions for future nurse scheduling models, as it is likely 39 40Reexamining the Nurse Scheduling Problem that nurse-to-patient ratios and nursing shortages will remain a challenge for health care organizations for some time.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reexamining the Nurse Scheduling Problem: Staffing Ratios and Nursing Shortages*

Wright¹,

Bretthauer²,

Côté³

2006

Decision Sciences

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“…(1) mean labor requirement [15] [16], (2) labor requirement amplitude [4] [7], (3) length of the operational day [4] [7], and (4) the shape of the labor requirements distribution [4] Although of sporadic quality and limited quantity, we believe that the relevant literature suggests the following: (1) the use of certain scheduling flexibility alternatives (e.g., meal-break flexibility [ 11, start-time float [2] 11 [29]. Accordingly, four sets of hypotheses were formulated regarding the presumed labor utilization effects of the scheduling flexibility and labor requirement characteristics studied: H 1 : Each labor scheduling flexibility and labor requirement characteristic effect will be significant for each labor requirement distribution.…”

Section: Research Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Research Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Labor Utilization Effects of Labor Scheduling Flexibility Alternatives in a Tour Scheduling Environment

Jacobs

Bechtold

1993

Decision Sciences

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This study used a factorial experimental design and a new modeling methodology to investigate the impact of a number of labor scheduling flexibility alternatives and labor requirements characteristics on labor utilization within a tour scheduling environment. Break-placement flexibility and shift-length flexibility were found to be extremely effective in improving labor utilization for all labor requirement distributions used. Flexibility with respect to the number of days included in a tour schedule resulted in substantial improvement in labor utilization for all labor requirements distributions exhibiting daily and/or weekly variation. Surprisingly, virtually no improvement in labor utilization was achieved for any labor requirement distribution by the removal of requirements for consecutive days off. In addition, almost no improvement was found by allowing the shift start time to vary across the working days included in tours. High labor requirement amplitude was found to have a strong adverse effect on labor utilization while longer operational days were associated with improved labor utilization for all labor requirement distributions. We discuss the implications of these results for service operations management and provide suggestions for future research.Subject Areas: Mathematical Programming and Production/Operations Management.

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“…As pointed out in [6], "Demand for services exhibits a variety of different within-/between-day patterns depending on the service organization . .…”

Section: Labor-scheduling Environmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

A simulated annealing approach to the cyclic staff-scheduling problem

Brusco¹,

Jacobs²

1993

Naval Research Logistics

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This article presents the application of a simulated annealing heuristic to an NP‐complete cyclic staff‐scheduling problem. The new heuristic is compared to branch‐and‐bound integer programming algorithms, as well as construction and linear programming‐based heuristics. It is designed for use in a continuously operating scheduling environment with the objective of minimizing the number of employees necessary to satisfy forecast demand. The results indicate that the simulated annealing‐based method tends to dominate the branch‐and‐bound algorithms and the other heuristics in terms of solution quality. Moreover, the annealing algorithm exhibited rapid convergence to a low‐cost solution. The simulated annealing heuristic is executed in a single program and does not require mathematical programming software. © 1993 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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A Methodology for Labor Scheduling in a Service Operating System

Cited by 56 publications

References 7 publications

Reexamining the Nurse Scheduling Problem: Staffing Ratios and Nursing Shortages*

Reexamining the Nurse Scheduling Problem: Staffing Ratios and Nursing Shortages*

Labor Utilization Effects of Labor Scheduling Flexibility Alternatives in a Tour Scheduling Environment

A simulated annealing approach to the cyclic staff-scheduling problem

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