Nurse rostering is a well-known highly constrained scheduling problem requiring assignment of shifts to nurses satisfying a variety of constraints. Exact algorithms may fail to produce high quality solutions, hence (meta)heuristics are commonly preferred as solution methods which are often designed and tuned for specific (group of) problem instances. Hyper-heuristics have emerged as general sea...

INTRODUCTION Resident physician/nurse collaboration is essential for patient safety and optimal clinical outcomes. Interprofessional shadowing experiences can facilitate understanding of team roles; however, enhanced may not transform individual practices leading to workplace improvement. This educational innovation utilized a resident/nurse shadow program raise awareness interprofessional role...

In this paper, we propose a search technique for nurse scheduling, which deals with it as a multi-objective problem. For each nurse, we first randomly generate a set of legal shift patterns which satisfy all shift-related hard constraints. We then employ an adaptive heuristic to quickly find a solution with the least number of violations on the coverage-related hard constraint, by assigning one...

Background Pediatric cardiac MRIs form a small but critical part of MRI imaging at a busy pediatric cardiac imaging center. We had a higher than acceptable rate of no-show and wait times for scheduled cardiac MRIs, which was a source of patient and provider dissatisfaction in our institution. Previously, the process of scheduling a cardiac MRI was facilitated by a nonmedical provider. Dedicated...

Efficient utilization of time and effort is essential in Personnel scheduling problems to evenly balance the workload among the people and attempt to satisfy the personnel preferences. In Constraint Satisfaction Problem based scheduling problems, when a branch of the search fails the backtracking search algorithm back up to the preceding variable and try a different value for it. So here the mo...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE In multicase pediatric ear, nose, and throat operating rooms (ORs), brief delays in early case start times often produce a cascading effect of lengthy delays by the end of the day and can often lead to patient, family, and staff dissatisfaction and increased labor costs due to unplanned overtime. We sought to improve actual end of day relative to scheduled end of day fr...

-Solving the nurse scheduling problem properly has a great impact on nurses' working conditions which are strongly related to the level of quality of health care and recruiting of qualified personnel. In this paper, a multi-objective approach is shown to be a very flexible tool for modeling this problem. Hence, it could be used in several specific contexts. Three different solution techniques a...

Schedules can be built in a similar way to a human scheduler by using a set of rules that involve domain knowledge. This paper presents an Estimation of Distribution Algorithm (EDA) for the nurse scheduling problem, which involves choosing a suitable scheduling rule from a set for the assignment of each nurse. Unlike previous work that used Genetic Algorithms (GAs) to implement implicit learnin...

Guided Complete Search (GCS) is a generic framework for combining and coordinating a tree search solver and a secondary solver to yield a complete and efficient CSP solver. The primary solver of GCS is systematic tree search augmented with constraint propagation algorithm, which is used to maintain the completeness of the GCS solver. The secondary solver of GCS can either be a complete or incom...

BACKGROUND The main purpose of this study was to discuss the nationality differences of foreign nurse aides and the effect of work stressors influencing work adjustment. And of helping them adapt to Taiwanese society, we summarized the difficulties that foreign nurse aides face in Taiwan. METHODS The subjects included 80 foreign nurse aides from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam who wor...