http://www3.eng.cam.ac.uk/~hj231/Papers/rostering.pdf

Staff scheduling and rostering: A review of applications, methods and models

Nurse rostering is a complex scheduling problem that affects hospital personnel on a daily basis all over the world. The need for quality software solutions is acute for a number of reasons. In particular, it is very important to efficiently utilise time and effort, to evenly balance the workload among people and to attempt to satisfy personnel preferences. A high quality roster can lead to a more contented and thus more effective workforce.

In this review, we discuss nurse rostering within the global personnel scheduling problem in healthcare. We begin by briefly discussing the review and overview papers that have appeared in the literature and by noting the role that nurse rostering plays within the wider context of longer term hospital personnel planning. The main body of the paper describes and critically evaluates solution approaches which span the interdisciplinary spectrum from operations research techniques to artificial intelligence methods. We conclude by drawing on the strengths and weaknesses of the literature to outline the key issues that need addressing in future nurse rostering research.

/pdf/the-state-of-the-art-of-nurse-rostering-4uxzrvsub8.pdf

The State of the Art of Nurse Rostering

Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems

Call centers are an increasingly important part of today's business world, employing millions of agents across the globe and serving as a primary customer-facing channel for firms in many different industries. Call centers have been a fertile area for operations management researchers in several domains, including forecasting, capacity planning, queueing, and personnel scheduling. In addition, as telecommunications and information technology have advanced over the past several years, the operational challenges faced by call center managers have become more complicated. Issues associated with human resources management, sales, and marketing have also become increasingly relevant to call center operations and associated academic research.

In this paper, we provide a survey of the recent literature on call center operations management. Along with traditional research areas, we pay special attention to new management challenges that have been caused by emerging technologies, to behavioral issues associated with both call center agents and customers, and to the interface between call center operations and sales and marketing. We identify a handful of broad themes for future investigation while also pointing out several very specific research opportunities.

/pdf/the-modern-call-center-a-multi-disciplinary-perspective-on-2kcrgkbqth.pdf

The Modern Call Center: A Multi-Disciplinary Perspective on Operations Management Research

Personnel scheduling: A literature review

Computational methods for rostering and personnel scheduling has been a subject of continued research and commercial interest since the 1950s. This annotated bibliography puts together a comprehensive collection of some 700 references in this area, focusing mainly on algorithms for generating rosters and personnel schedules but also covering related areas such as workforce planning and estimating staffing requirements. We classify these papers according to the type of problem addressed, the application areas covered and the methods used. In addition, a short summary is provided for each paper.

http://www3.eng.cam.ac.uk/~hj231/Papers/AORRosteringPaper.pdf

An Annotated Bibliography of Personnel Scheduling and Rostering

Train crew management involves the development of a duty timetable for each of the drivers (crew) to cover a given train timetable in a rail transport organization. This duty timetable is spread over a certain period, known as the roster planning horizon. Train crew management may arise either from the planning stage, when the total number of crew and crew distributions are to be determined, or from the operating stage when the number of crew at each depot is known as input data. In this paper, we are interested in train crew management in the planning stage. In the literature, train crew management is decomposed into two stages: crew scheduling and crew rostering which are solved sequentially. We propose an integrated optimization model to solve both crew scheduling and crew rostering. The model enables us to generate either cyclic rosters or non-cyclic rosters. Numerical experiments are carried out over data sets arising from a practical application.

An Integrated Optimization Model for Train Crew Management

Objective
The objective of this research is to identify optimal inpatient discharge time targets to help hospitals reduce crowding, improve patient flow through the ED and balance staff workload.

Methods
Fifteen months of emergency and inpatient records from a large quaternary teaching hospital were used to reconstruct patient pathways from hospital presentation to discharge. Discrete event simulation was used to assess operationally realistic discharge scenarios on flow performance. Main output measures included National Emergency Access Target (NEAT) performance (an ED performance metric), time spent waiting for a bed, hospital length of stay (LOS) and occupancy.

Results
Similar levels of improvement in NEAT performance (16%), and reductions in average bed occupancy (1.5%) and inpatient bed wait time (25%) were observed across the simulation that discharged 80% patients before 11 a.m. and one that spread the target between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Individual inpatient wards returned potential improvements in NEAT performance (median 10%, interquartile range (IQR) 7%), and reductions in hospital LOS (median 1%, IQR 1%) and average occupancy (median 1%, IQR 2%) across the discharge scenarios.

Conclusions
Conventional discharge targets like ‘80% by 11 a.m.’ and others that spread targets across the day to balance staff workload freed up the equivalent of nine available beds for incoming patient flow, significantly reducing time spent waiting for an inpatient bed, hospital LOS and occupancy, and delivering much needed improvements in NEAT performance. While different strategies and workload distributions may suit individual hospital services, the study makes a strong case for improving ‘early in the day’ discharge timeliness to deliver better ED flow.

Discharge timeliness and its impact on hospital crowding and emergency department flow performance.

The human resource planning and scheduling system described in this paper assists in the rostering of approximately 500 staff for the airport operations of a major international airline at one of the busiest international airports. The system rosters airline ground staff over a monthly planning horizon so that the work load is evenly distributed among the staff and idle time, the main productivity measure, is minimised. The rosters are subject to a large number of rules designed to ensure reasonable working conditions and service stand-ards. The system then allocates individual tasks to the staff for any particular day, and effectively manages, in real-time, disruptions that occur due to aircraft delays and unplanned staff absences on the day of operations. The system is also designed to reduce the number of staff needed to run the present rostering system. In this paper, we provide a description of the overall system and an algorithm for solving the rostering problem associated with the system.

David Sier

Papers

Staff scheduling and rostering: A review of applications, methods and models

An Annotated Bibliography of Personnel Scheduling and Rostering

An Integrated Optimization Model for Train Crew Management

Discharge timeliness and its impact on hospital crowding and emergency department flow performance.

Staff rostering at a large international airport