Cyclic shift scheduling with on-call duties for emergency medical services

Abstract

In workforce scheduling for emergency medical services, it is important to ensure sufficient coverage at all time. Thus, planning has to consider unpredictable employee absences. To hedge against this type of uncertainty, on-call duties can be assigned to employees. In practice, these are often assigned ex-post based on the regular schedule. Little literature on workforce scheduling for ambulances or the planning of on-call duties exists. We present new set covering based integer programming formulations for cyclic stint-based staff scheduling with on-call duties. It is desirable for employees to work on consecutive days, called a stint, with a subsequent recovery period. On-call duties can be individually scheduled in-between two stints. Our model formulations integrate different cycle times for regular and on-call duties. A simple schedule that repeats quickly is devised for regular duties, while the on-call duty schedule rotates after each cycle to ensure fairness. The proposed models are applied to a local German emergency medical services provider. Using our stint-based model formulations, the planning complexity has been greatly reduced and reasonably large problem instances can be solved to optimality. Employee preferences, such as fairness, less work on weekends and longer recovery times, were taken into account to a high degree.

A decomposition heuristic for rotational workforce scheduling

“…The objective is to find a solution that satisfies all constraints. Several mathematical formulations with similar features are proposed by Rocha et al (2013); Musliu et al (2018); Becker et al (2019). It is a direct formulation in the sense that most practical constraints can be directly mapped to mathematical constraints.…”

“…This structure is often found in manufacturing and organizations from the public sector such as emergency medical services, fire, and police departments (Laporte 1999). Once a suitable rotational schedule has been found, planning is greatly simplified as the manager and employees repeat the same schedule (Becker et al 2019). An exemplary rotational schedule and the resulting coverage are depicted in Fig.…”

Machine Learning Applied to Walk-in Demand Prediction of a University Counseling Center

“…Previous work has addressed modelling techniques for uncertainty in demand for on-call appointment types in emergency department settings (Bard and Purnomo, 2005;Becker et al, 2018;Hong et al, 2018;Sherali et al, 2002;and Wiler et al, 2011). Bard and Purnomo (2005) used integer programming methods to analyze the fluctuations in supply and demand for nurses and schedule them accordingly.…”

“…Bard and Purnomo (2005) used integer programming methods to analyze the fluctuations in supply and demand for nurses and schedule them accordingly. Becker et al (2018) used set-covering based integer programming to schedule emergency medical services. They used employee preferences and previous shift schedules to create a schedule to maximize the minimum number of free weekends for employees.…”

Applying Linear Programming in Employee Scheduling Problem during Off-Season: A Case Study

“…The weak scheduling can be a massive barrier to teamwork that can severely affect the worker's output [5]. According to Becker et al [6] in scheduling the tasks that need to be considered are employee's sequencing, shifting, grouping, timing and so on. Generally, constraints are categorized as (i) hard and (ii) soft constraints.…”