Physician Scheduling in Emergency Rooms

We discuss the problem of constructing physician schedules in emergency rooms. Starting from practical instances encountered in six different hospitals of the Montreal (Canada) area, we first we propose generic forms for the constraints encountered in this context. We then review several possible solution techniques that can be applied to physician scheduling problems, namely tabu search, column generation, mathematical programming and constraint programming, and examine their suitability for application depending on the specifics of the situation at hand. We conclude by discussing the problems encountered when trying to perform computational comparisons of solution techniques on the basis of implementations in different practical settings.