The Doctor Rostering Problem - Asser Fahrenholz

Chapter 2
The Doctor Rostering Problem
In this chapter, I present the background for the problem, the specific problem concepts
and review literary sources that have served as inspiration to this project.
2.1 Background
Every four months, one of the doctors at the medical practice in St. Heddinge 1 , schedules
the treatment of the acute patients in the immediate vicinity. This treatment must be
done by one or two of the six doctors, subject to higher workloads after weekends and
holidays and before holidays (somehow, people can avoid getting ill during holidays).
The scheduling is done with no computer aided support, takes approximately five to ten
hours and is tedious due to required gathering of available hours from each individual
member of the workforce. The information tells the planner which doctor is available
when, during the next four months. The planner must then assign the doctors to shifts
in such a way that certain shift-patterns are avoided and such that every member of the
workforce receives equally many shifts. This approach to schedule planning, performed
by an employee without decision support tools, is often called self-scheduling (Burke
et al. [5]).
The schedule planned by the doctor is chosen to be non-cyclical, or flexible (Silvestro
and Silvestro [22]), due to the medical practice being a private one, where the members
of the workforce prefer ad-hoc schedules.
This problem is similar in nature to the Nurse Scheduling Problem (NSP) (or Staff
Scheduling Problem). NSP is the problem of assigning a fleet of nurses to shifts of
varying types, in a period of time. The assignments must respect both personal wishes
1 South-east of Køge, Denmark
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