A heuristic approach for nurse scheduling under two- and three-shifts workers mixed situation

Abstract

Most of previous researches on nurse scheduling have focused on the problem where all nurses targeted for scheduling work on the same employment pattern. However, against the background of nurse shortage, the employment patterns of nurses are becoming diversified in Japanese hospitals and it makes nurse scheduling more complicated. This paper deals with the nurse scheduling problems under different types of shift workers mixed situation and proposes a heuristic method based on a series of heuristic rules for generating desirable schedules under this situation efficiently. Numerical experiments on the examples in a Japanese hospital which hires the nurses as either two-shift workers or three-shift workers demonstrate that the proposed method provides schedules with acceptable quality and the computation time of it is short enough for practical use.