Distributed And Devolved Work Allocation Planning

Work allocation planning is a vital and notoriously difficult task in areas characterised by large work forces, contiguous and sometimes overlapping shifts, regulatory and corporate constraints, and tightly managed work force establishment. In the allocation of nurses to ward shifts, forward planning is widely acknowledged to be essential, but the majority of efforts in this highly constrained area rely on manual techniques. Health service policy is being driven increasingly towards maximum efficiency and accountability, resulting in the need for more accurate long-term planning. This paper discusses an approach to this problem, using a strategy of distributing and devolving the computational effort required. In the pre-processing stage, the staff to be rostered are treated as semi-autonomous agents, each with individual responsibility for their initial assignment, and communication with a global constraint solving (CLP) agent. This has proved to be intuitive to build and effective in use. 1.0 Work allocation planning Health service provision sets itself rigorous standards in terms of the care it gives to its clients, along with its efficient management. In terms of nurse provision, this leads to the apparently conflicting needs of economy and the maintenance of standards, with the allocation of nursing staff being managed in a way familiar in modern industry. However, the situation is rendered complex by the very nature of the varying needs of patients, the development of ‘safe’ provision standards, and the trend towards more responsibility for the nurse in everyday care. It is becoming increasingly important for long-term work allocation planning for a number of reasons, not least of all to facilitate an ability to predict future shortfall and to make early remedial decisions. The problem can generally be summarised as the assignment of staff to particular time slots in order to satisfy given criteria. The criteria can be simple or complex, sometimes involving legal, corporate and safety issues in addition to heuristics that govern individuals and ever-changing institutional rules. The rostering of nurses is widely accepted as an important and challenging intellectual problem that belongs to the class NP-complete. Many studies have been undertaken in the area, using techniques such as mathematical programming (Miller, et. al. 1976), heuristic methods (Isken & Hancock 1991) and constraint satisfaction techniques (Abdennadher & Sclenker 1999), (Cheng et. al.,