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Solving the Problem of Rerostering Nurse Schedules with Hard Constraints: New Multicommodity Flow Models

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Abstract

The problem of rerostering nurse schedules arises in hospitals when at least one nurse informs that she will be unable to perform the shifts assigned to her on one or more future work days. As a result, the current roster must be rebuilt in accordance with labour contract rules and institutional requirements. All such restraints are regarded as hard constraints. However, major alterations in the previously assigned nurse schedules must be avoided. This paper is based on a case study of a public hospital in Portugal. It presents two new integer multicommodity flow formulations for the rerostering problem, besides a computational experiment performed using real data. The first model is based on a directed multilevel acyclic network. The aggregation of nodes in this network led to the second model. The results obtained show that the second integer multicommodity flow formulation outperforms the first, both in terms of solution quality, as well as in computational time.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics, Institute of Economics and Business Administration, Technical University of Lisbon, Rua do Quelhas, 6, 1200-781, Lisboa, Portugal, and

    Margarida Moz & Margarida Vaz Pato

  2. Centre of Operational Research, aculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon, Portugal

    Margarida Moz & Margarida Vaz Pato

Authors
  1. Margarida Moz
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  2. Margarida Vaz Pato
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Moz, M., Pato, M.V. Solving the Problem of Rerostering Nurse Schedules with Hard Constraints: New Multicommodity Flow Models. Annals of Operations Research 128, 179–197 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:ANOR.0000019104.39239.ed

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/B:ANOR.0000019104.39239.ed

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