A heuristic algorithm for medical staff’s scheduling problems with multiskills and vacation control

INTRODUCTION: The main issue related to the duty schedule is to allocate medical staff to each medical department by considering personnel skills and personal vocation preferences. However, how to effectively use staff’s multiskill characteristics and how to execute vocation control have not been well investigated. OBJECTIVES: This article aims to develop duty scheduling and vacation permission decisions to minimize the sum of customers’ waiting costs, the overtime cost of medical staff, the cost of failing to meet medical staff’ vacation requirements, and the cost of mutual support between departments. METHODS: This study formulated the problem as a multiperiod mixed integer nonlinear programming model and developed a hybrid heuristic based on evolutionary mechanism of genetic algorithm and linear programming to efficiently solve the proposed model. RESULTS: Five types of problems were solved through Lingo optimization and the proposed approach. For small-scale problems, both methods can find the optimal solutions. For a slightly larger problem, the solutions found by the proposed approach are superior those of Lingo. CONCLUSION: This research discusses the complex decision-making problem of on-duty arrangement and vacation control of medical staff in a multidepartmental medical center. This research formulates the medical staff’s scheduling and vacation control problems as constrained mixed integer quadratic programming problems. Computational results indicate that the proposed approach can efficiently produce compromise solutions that outperform the solutions of the Lingo optimization software.