The nurse scheduling problem: a goal programming and nonlinear optimization approaches

Abstract

Nurses scheduling is an activity of allocating nurses to conduct a set of tasks at certain room at a hospital or health centre within a certain period. One of obstacles in the nurse scheduling is the lack of resources in order to fulfil the needs of the hospital. Nurse scheduling which is undertaken manually will be at risk of not fulfilling some nursing rules set by the hospital. Therefore, this study aimed to perform scheduling models that satisfy all the specific rules set by the management of Bogor State Hospital. We have developed three models to overcome the scheduling needs. Model 1 is designed to schedule nurses who are solely assigned to a certain inpatient unit and Model 2 is constructed to manage nurses who are assigned to an inpatient room as well as at Polyclinic room as conjunct nurses. As the assignment of nurses on each shift is uneven, then we propose Model 3 to minimize the variance of the workload in order to achieve equitable assignment on every shift. The first two models are formulated in goal programming framework, while the last model is in nonlinear optimization form.