A hybrid heuristic approach of nurse scheduling problem

Purpose -Nurse scheduling problem is a key issue in strategic management in healthcare institutes. To improve the current manual-made nurse schedule, this paper presents a hybrid heuristic approach to generate weekly nurse schedule for a local Emergency Department (ED) in Hong Kong. Design/methodology/approach -A two-stage method is developed for the above purpose. In the first stage, approve-in-principle day-offs are manually inputted to scheduling system by nurse officer, then different types of shifts are assigned by simple heuristic algorithm satisfying all hard constraints. In the second stage, an alternative variable neighbourhood search approach is introduced as a post-processing procedure to incorporate the nurse preferences (soft constraints) into the schedule. Findings – Our approach produces high quality solutions and demonstrates a substantial level of user-friendliness and is flexible to adapt to alternative constraints adopted by other EDs. Originality/value -It is one of the few studies in nurse scheduling literature using heuristic model integrated with variable neighbourhood search algorithm to automatically generate nurse schedule in mere Excel spreadsheet. Our approach is superior over the traditional linear programming approach in terms of calculation time and user-friendliness.