Utilizing Particle Swarm Optimisation Techniques in Solving Unfair Nurse Scheduling Problem

Abstract

Employee schedule is a list showing the arrangement such as dates and times of each employee must work at a particular period of time. Employee scheduling is one of the important tasks need to be concerned as it influences the organizational productivity of the complex tasks among employees. Common issues in healthcare systems worldwide specifically in employee scheduling are the unfairness of the working shifts between nurses and the shortages of nursing staffs combined with the uncertain nature of patient workloads. Assigning each available nurse to the right place at the right time is therefore a major concern among many healthcare organizations. A well-designed schedule algorithm shall be able to generate an efficient work task that can precede restriction and variability. Nevertheless, the fairness of the task been assigned to the nurses should also be considered from their perspectives. This journal discusses the entire nurse scheduling problem as well as methods with optimizing techniques and efficient solution algorithms used to address the problem with fairness as the key objective function. The result from the simulated data represents how the tasks are being assigned fairly among nurses. Detailed discussion of these aspects shall be provided in the main body of the paper