Abstract
Health care providers are affected by problems of personnel costs. Usually, the generation of rosters is a hand-made and time-consuming task and does not always comply with the legislation and the internal rules. The article presents an approach to roster generation for nursing technicians according to legal and internal restrictions and in a satisfactory period of time. It is also designed to give employees a higher level of satisfaction concerning their day off preferences and a fair distribution of unpopular shifts.The article’s proposal is to develop a hybrid system formed by a Tabu Search metaheuristic combined with a genetic algorithm. Experiments were carried out with artificial test cases based on real data. The results obtained were satisfactory, showing the feasibility of the solution in all tests performed. Key words: rostering problem, tabu search, genetic algorithm, hybrid systems.
Highlights
Productivity problems and personnel turnover affect the costs of health care providers
In the literature one can find real cases of the rostering problem treated with metaheuristics: Simulated Annealing as in Dowling (Dowling et al, 1997), Tabu Search (TS) as in Dowsland (Dowsland, 1998) and Burke (Burke et al, 1998), Genetic Algorithms (GA) as in Burke (Burke et al, 2001), Özcan (Özcan, 2005), Yeh (2007) and Tsai (Tsai and Li, 2009), and Iterated Local Search
The model significantly reduced the penalties, including the days off requests, which is a very important requirement for the technicians
Summary
Productivity problems and personnel turnover affect the costs of health care providers. The failure to use computational tools for nurse rostering leads most of the hospitals and clinics to handle this task manually This a time-consuming task, since the schedules must be in accordance with the legislation, follow the organization’s internal rules and take into account most of the employees’ preferences. Modelling the nurse rostering problem is not a trivial task, due to the large number of constraints to be considered and the complexity of the objective function that seeks, in general, to maximize the overall satisfaction of nurses or to reduce hospital costs by setting the schedule of nurses. A monthly schedule of nursing presents the distribution of an infirmary team, considering every day of the month and the work shifts. In practice some relaxation is possible in this period; Ideal covering: it is preferable to work with the largest possible number of allocated personnel, but there is an ideal minimum number of personnel to be allocated to each ward / shift/day
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