Flexible Shift Planning in the Service Industry

The introductory chapter consists of four sections. In Sect. 1. 1 we reveal the c- rent situation in hospitals that is faced by the management. We address the general issue of personnel scheduling in the service industry in Sect. 1. 2. Then we motivate our research by considering physicians as the scheduling object. In particular, we show the complex nature of physician scheduling in a hospital environment. The focus of the research is presented in Sect. 1. 3. Finally, we conclude the chapter by illustrating the outline of the thesis. 1. 1 General Economic Situation in Hospitals The mounting pressure in the health care industry to reduce costs is forcing hos- tals and related facilities to take a closer look at their staf?ng policies (see [111]). A primary dif?culty in reducing personnel costs, the major component of the budget, is the variability in demand and the need to assign staff to ?xed shifts. Furthermore, government run facilities, especially those in the European Union, are seeing their budgets cut in terms of real dollars despite an aging and more acutely ill patient population (e. g. , see [96]). It has been reported that up to a third of the hospitals in Germanyplan a reductionin staff (see [91]). The schedulingprocess is furtherc- plicated by the generally recognized importance of taking individual preferences intoaccount. Moreattractiveschedulespromotejobsatisfaction,increaseproduct- ity,and reduceturnover(cf. [2]). However,withoutimprovedschedulingprocedures that better match supplyto demand,the level of care that theynow providewill soon become unsustainable. 1.

Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Klappentext

The book presents new ideas to model and solve the flexible shift planning problem of personnel workers in the service industry. First, a new modeling approach is proposed that requires shifts to be generated implicitly rather than employing a predefined set of shift types like three 8-hour or two 12-hour shifts to cover varying forecast demand. The objective is to minimize the total cost of the assignments given the general and individual labor restrictions.

Second, to find high quality assignments two solution methodologies are presented. A heuristic decomposition strategy decomposes the problem into weekly subproblems whereas a branch-and-price algorithm that uses several branching rules decomposes the model by worker types. The master problem uses a set covering formulation whereas the subproblems are mixed integer programs. The modeling and solution methodologies are developed and tested using the example of physicians from an anesthesia department of a German university hospital.

Inhalt
Literature Review on Personnel Scheduling.- MIP Model for Flexible Shift Scheduling of Physicians.- Solution Methodologies.- Experimental Investigations.- Conclusions and Further Remarks.