TY - JOUR
T1 - Applying simulated annealing to the nurse rostering problem in an emergency department
AU - Lin, Shih Wei
AU - Lee, Yueh E.
AU - Chen, Li Chen
AU - Chang, Her Kun
AU - Lin, Chih Feng
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 The Authors and IOS Press.
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - As living standards rise, patient requirements for medical quality increase. To provide better service, human resource management of hospitals has become a critical issue. Because the shortage of manpower and hospitals must have nursing staff standing by round the clock, unreasonable roster may be generated. As a result, nursing staff do not have enough rest time, resulting in low work efficiency. To prevent this situation, a roster satisfying the requirements of both the nursing staff and the health care regulations is required. This is especially true of the emergency department, discussed in this study. An emergency department may have 12 types of shifts and over one hundred nursing staff to be scheduled. In addition to the hard constraints of legal regulations and hospital policies, staff scheduling should also consider the soft constraints of the personal preferences of individual nursing staff. This makes it a time-consuming work. Therefore, this study proposes a simulated annealing (SA) algorithm to solve this problem. In order to validate performance of the algorithm, data collected from the emergency department of a large-scale hospital in northern Taiwan was scheduled via our approach and compared with the manual rosters. The results showed that the SA obtained a roster which met both the hard and soft constraints, as well as the requirements of the hospital, within one hour, even in months with tight manpower.
AB - As living standards rise, patient requirements for medical quality increase. To provide better service, human resource management of hospitals has become a critical issue. Because the shortage of manpower and hospitals must have nursing staff standing by round the clock, unreasonable roster may be generated. As a result, nursing staff do not have enough rest time, resulting in low work efficiency. To prevent this situation, a roster satisfying the requirements of both the nursing staff and the health care regulations is required. This is especially true of the emergency department, discussed in this study. An emergency department may have 12 types of shifts and over one hundred nursing staff to be scheduled. In addition to the hard constraints of legal regulations and hospital policies, staff scheduling should also consider the soft constraints of the personal preferences of individual nursing staff. This makes it a time-consuming work. Therefore, this study proposes a simulated annealing (SA) algorithm to solve this problem. In order to validate performance of the algorithm, data collected from the emergency department of a large-scale hospital in northern Taiwan was scheduled via our approach and compared with the manual rosters. The results showed that the SA obtained a roster which met both the hard and soft constraints, as well as the requirements of the hospital, within one hour, even in months with tight manpower.
KW - Emergency
KW - Nurse rostering problem
KW - Simulated annealing
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84946093927&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3233/978-1-61499-440-4-852
DO - 10.3233/978-1-61499-440-4-852
M3 - 会议文章
AN - SCOPUS:84946093927
SN - 2352-751X
SP - 852
EP - 860
JO - Advances in Transdisciplinary Engineering
JF - Advances in Transdisciplinary Engineering
T2 - 21st ISPE Inc. International Conference on Concurrent Engineering: Moving Integrated Product Development to Service Clouds in the Global Economy, CE 2014
Y2 - 8 September 2014 through 11 September 2014
ER -