New Solution for a Benchmark Nurse Scheduling Problem Using Integer Programming

Abstract

In this paper, we formulate nurse scheduling problem in modern hospital environment as an integer programming (IP) problem. We simplify the nurse scheduling problem by transforming it through Information Granulation which enables the original problem to be expressed and solved more easily. The solution of the simplified problem is followed by a refinement of this solution to ensure that all constraints of the original problem are taken into account. We have used the GNU Octave, open source mathematical modelling and simulation software for Windows to solve the simplified problem expressed as Integer Programming problem. We used the branch and bound and dual simplex version of the integer programming solver. Very promising results from the real life benchmark problem sets are reported and are compared to the results reported in the literature. Results show that the proposed algorithm facilitates computation of feasible schedules in a short time. We suggest that the proposed methodology can be applied to other resource allocation problems with a large number of constraints.