Article ID: | iaor20083936 |
Country: | Netherlands |
Volume: | 175 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 258 |
End Page Number: | 278 |
Publication Date: | Nov 2006 |
Journal: | European Journal of Operational Research |
Authors: | Demeulemeester Erik, Belin Jeroen |
Keywords: | scheduling, programming: integer, personnel & manpower planning |
Scheduling trainees (graduate students) is a complicated problem that has to be solved frequently in many hospital departments. We will describe a trainee-scheduling problem encountered in practice (at the ophthalmology department of the university hospital Gasthuisberg, Leuven). In this problem, a department has a number of trainees at its disposal, which assist specialists in their activities (surgery, consultation, etc.). For each trainee one has to schedule the activities in which (s)he will assist during a certain time horizon, usually one year. Typically, this kind of scheduling problem is characterized by four types of constraints: work covering constraints, formation requirements, non-availability constraints and setup restrictions. In this paper, we will describe an exact branch-and-price method to solve the problem to optimality.