ABSTRACT
As an industrial engineering student, I was aware that a number of operations research (management science) analytic toolsets in which I was being trained could benefit health care operations management decision makers. I have many friends who work within hospitals. I became aware through discussions with them, and via my own life experiences, that the creation of work schedules, obviously of great importance to frontline workers, is usually done manually, is very time intensive for managers/schedulers, and is often felt by the workers to lack fairness. Integer programming and optimization is a methodology routinely taught to industrial engineering students that lends itself to complex scheduling issues: the need to schedule staff in the context of multiple known constraints and then mathematically arrive at an optimal solution. I decided to apply what I had learned about integer programming and optimization in the classroom to improve fairness in nurse scheduling. Thus, I developed an auction (bidding) approach to antecede a traditional integer programming solution.
