Managing Personnel through Staff Scheduling Algorithms
This article presents a literature review of the current state of staff scheduling, in particular nurse scheduling. In current health care service, the critical problem in nurse scheduling in a hospital is how to determine day-to-day shift assignments of each nurse for a period of time in a way that satisfies the given requirements of a hospital. As a basis, the formal analysis of the problem is performed and a general scheduling procedure was established. Based on the method, a word processing template or software system which produces a scheduling program for a given institution was developed. Another objective of scheduling is optimization. Optimization of personnel scheduling consists of the selection of those work patterns that meet total work requirements at the lowest cost. Various approaches to alleviate the scheduling quagmire while attaining optimization are presented in this paper. Analysis of each of these approaches along with their effectiveness is presented. We anticipate that one of these approaches researched will provide the backbone to develop a system suitable for use at Duke University's medical oncology department.
