Isken M W, Hancock W M
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
J Soc Health Syst. 1991;2(2):24-41.
We present a practical approach to personnel scheduling problems arising in hospital units with demand that is of an urgent nature, cannot be backlogged, and is highly dependent on the time of day. A simple rounding heuristic is combined with a simulated annealing algorithm to obtain near-optimal solutions to large linear integer programming models of these personnel scheduling problems in a reasonable amount of time on a personal computer. The models are designed to complement the current state-of-the-art of commercially available hospital staff scheduling systems.