Scheduling Nursing Personnel According to Nursing Preference: A Mathematical Programming Approach

This paper describes a nurse scheduling system, the heart of which poses the scheduling decision as a large multiple-choice programming problem whose objective function quantifies preferences of individual nursing personnel concerning length of work stretch, rotation patterns, and requests for days off. The constraints provide for minimum numbers of nursing personnel of each skill class to be assigned to each day and shift of a four- or six-week scheduling period. The problem is solved by a modification of Balintfy and Blackburn's algorithm for multiple-choice programming problems. We include a description of the implementation of the scheduling system on nursing units of several hospitals.