A study on constraint extraction and exception exclusion in care worker scheduling

TL;DR

This paper presents a method for extracting facility-specific constraints and excluding exceptions in care worker scheduling, improving schedule quality by reducing violations of soft constraints.

Contribution

It introduces constraint templates and mechanisms to exclude exceptions, enabling more accurate and adaptable schedule generation for long-term care facilities.

Findings

Successfully created schedules satisfying all hard constraints.

Reduced soft constraint violations by excluding exceptional constraints.

Demonstrated adaptability to different facility conditions.

Abstract

Technologies for automatically generating work schedules have been extensively studied; however, in long-term care facilities, the conditions vary between facilities, making it essential to interview the managers who create shift schedules to design facility-specific constraint conditions. The proposed method utilizes constraint templates to extract combinations of various components, such as shift patterns for consecutive days or staff combinations. The templates can extract a variety of constraints by changing the number of days and the number of staff members to focus on and changing the extraction focus to patterns or frequency. In addition, unlike existing constraint extraction techniques, this study incorporates mechanisms to exclude exceptional constraints. The extracted constraints can be employed by a constraint programming solver to create care worker schedules. Experiments demonstrated that our proposed method successfully created schedules that satisfied all hard constraints and reduced the number of violations for soft constraints by circumventing the extraction of exceptional constraints.