A Greedy Double Swap Heuristic for Nurse Scheduling

TL;DR

This paper introduces a greedy double swap heuristic for nurse scheduling that efficiently balances regulatory constraints, patient demands, and nurses' preferences, aiming to improve schedule quality and staff satisfaction.

Contribution

It presents a novel, simple heuristic method for nurse scheduling that considers both hard constraints and staff preferences, implemented in open source spreadsheet software.

Findings

Heuristic achieves fast scheduling solutions.

Balances constraints with staff preferences effectively.

Demonstrated on open source spreadsheet software.

Abstract

One of the key challenges of nurse scheduling problem (NSP) is the number of constraints placed on preparing the timetable, both from the regulatory requirements as well as the patients' demand for the appropriate nursing care specialists. In addition, the preferences of the nursing staffs related to their work schedules add another dimension of complexity. Most solutions proposed for solving nurse scheduling involve the use of mathematical programming and generally considers only the hard constraints. However, the psychological needs of the nurses are ignored and this resulted in subsequent interventions by the nursing staffs to remedy any deficiency and often results in last minute changes to the schedule. In this paper, we present a staff preference optimization framework which is solved with a greedy double swap heuristic. The heuristic yields good performance in speed at solving the problem. The heuristic is simple and we will demonstrate its performance by implementing it on open source spreadsheet software.