The State of the Art of Nurse Rostering

Abstract

Nurse rostering is a complex scheduling problem that affects hospital personnel on a daily basis all over the world. The need for quality software solutions is acute for a number of reasons. In particular, it is very important to efficiently utilise time and effort, to evenly balance the workload among people and to attempt to satisfy personnel preferences. A high quality roster can lead to a more contented and thus more effective workforce.In this review, we discuss nurse rostering within the global personnel scheduling problem in healthcare. We begin by briefly discussing the review and overview papers that have appeared in the literature and by noting the role that nurse rostering plays within the wider context of longer term hospital personnel planning. The main body of the paper describes and critically evaluates solution approaches which span the interdisciplinary spectrum from operations research techniques to artificial intelligence methods. We conclude by drawing on the strengths and weaknesses of the literature to outline the key issues that need addressing in future nurse rostering research.

A simulated annealing hyper-heuristic methodology for flexible decision support

“…Each nurse can work on one of a number of predefined " shift patterns" with an associated penalty value to represent its preference. For a more detailed discussion of this problem see (Aickelin and Dowsland 2000) and for an overview of nurse rostering in general see (Burke et al 2004). …”

Software Para Prevenção De Burnout No Uso De Equipamentos Médicos: Uma Proposta Para Detecção De Indícios De Estresse Em Centros Cirúrgicos E Intensivos

“…Poltosi e Gómez (2007), em seu modelamento computacional para resolver o problema do trato manual da escala de trabalho, basearam-se nos estudos de Burke et al (2004) e consideraram como desejável ao processamento o respeito às solicitações de datas por parte dos profissionais de saúde, a distribuição de plantões, os finais de semana e as folgas adicionais. Portanto, a escala de trabalho visa obter o maior nível de satisfação dos funcionários, atender as preferências de folgas e a distribuição justa de plantões impopulares, respeitando a legislação e as normas vigentes.…”

Solving weighted CSPs with meta-constraints by reformulation into satisfiability modulo theories

“…There exist many formalisations of the NRP [9]. In our experiments we have considered the (complete) GPost instance (of which we have modelled a variant in Section 5) as well as many instances from the Nurse Scheduling Problem Library (NSPLib) [35], by conducting a precise study of the effects of the homogeneity meta-constraints on them.…”

“…Meta-constraints can be very helpful in the modelling process, since they allow us to abstract to a higher level, expressing, e.g., priorities between a set of soft constraints, different levels of preference (multi-objective optimisation), etc. For example, in the well-known Nurse Rostering Problem (NRP) [9], it is preferable to violate the constraint about the number of consecutive days that a nurse can work than the constraint about the minimum number of nurses per shift. We could also wish to impose certain homogeneity on the amount of violation of different sets of constraints.…”