The Doctor Rostering Problem - Asser Fahrenholz

Chapter 8
Future considerations
This chapter describes suggested improvements to the implemented methods for solving
the DRP. It is a goal of this chapter that the descriptions are as thorough as possible,
allowing the reader to gain a complete understanding of how it was to be implemented,
should the time horizon on this project have allowed it.
8.1 User-added rules - relation/logic of shifts
As noted earlier, the rules of this project has been hard-coded. This means that no
rules can be added or removed by the end user. For the end the user to be able to
dynamically add rules, a framework is needed, that described how the elements in the
rule are structured and what these elements can consist of. In the following, I describe
the type of some of the rules that chapter 3 covers, such that the reader may gain an
idea of how this was to be implemented if there had been time to do so (note, other
types of rules could be devised as well):
Type 1 is the basic ’if you have this shift, you can not have that shift’-rule: The user
is given a starting point from which to define the rule. To start off, we assume
all doctors to be equal so all rules apply to all doctors and all rules to apply to
all days and shifts. Let us call the starting point of a rule p(i, j), where i defines
the days and j defines the shift on that day. One way to define a user added rule
could be to construct three basic elements in the rule:
1. the starting point: a set P1 of starting points p(i, j)
2. a comparator: =, =, ≤, ≥, < or >
3. the end point: a set P2 of end points
53