# A Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm for Healthcare Workforce Scheduling

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a multi-objective genetic algorithm for healthcare workforce scheduling that balances costs, patient care, and staff satisfaction, demonstrating significant improvements over manual scheduling methods.

## Contribution

It presents a novel multi-objective genetic algorithm tailored for complex hospital workforce scheduling with real-world considerations.

## Key findings

- 66% performance improvement over baseline scheduling
- Generates balanced, high-quality schedules
- Effectively manages operational and staff objectives

## Abstract

Workforce scheduling in the healthcare sector is a significant operational challenge, characterized by fluctuating patient loads, diverse clinical skills, and the critical need to control labor costs while upholding high standards of patient care. This problem is inherently multi-objective, demanding a delicate balance between competing goals: minimizing payroll, ensuring adequate staffing for patient needs, and accommodating staff preferences to mitigate burnout. We propose a Multi-objective Genetic Algorithm (MOO-GA) that models the hospital unit workforce scheduling problem as a multi-objective optimization task. Our model incorporates real-world complexities, including hourly appointment-driven demand and the use of modular shifts for a multi-skilled workforce. By defining objective functions for cost, patient care coverage, and staff satisfaction, the GA navigates the vast search space to identify a set of high-quality, non-dominated solutions. Demonstrated on datasets representing a typical hospital unit, the results show that our MOO-GA generates robust and balanced schedules. On average, the schedules produced by our algorithm showed a 66\% performance improvement over a baseline that simulates a conventional, manual scheduling process. This approach effectively manages trade-offs between critical operational and staff-centric objectives, providing a practical decision support tool for nurse managers and hospital administrators.