Solving Nurse Scheduling Problem Using Constraint Programming (CP) Technique

Abstract

Staff scheduling is a universal problem that can be encountered in many organizations, such as call centers, educational institution, industry, hospital, and any other public services. It is one of the most important aspects of workforce management strategy. Mostly, it is prone to errors or issues as there are many entities that should be addressed, such as the staff turnover, employee availability, time between rotations, unusual periods of activity, and even the last-minute shift changes. In this paper, constraint programming (CP) algorithm was developed to solve the nurse scheduling problem. The developed constraint programming algorithm was then implemented using python programming language. The developed CP algorithm was experimented with varying number of nurses. Experimental result confirmed that CP algorithm was able to solve nurse scheduling problem with promising results.