Spreadsheet model helps to assign medical residents at the University of Vermont's College of Medicine

This paper describes a spreadsheet model that MBA students enrolled in an MS course constructed to replace the manual method of assigning medical residents in radiology to on–call and emergency rotations at the University of Vermont's College of Medicine. Although it contains more than 10,000 variables, the model was easy to build and solve by practitioners who are ‘lightly educated’ in OR/MS. Based on this group's work, we discuss an approach that end–user practitioners can take to create spreadsheet optimization models. We also provide several observations and argue that spreadsheet models can provide an alternative scheduling method for problems of a smaller scope. Despite the major advances in personnel–scheduling methodologies and software, manual scheduling is still the predominant method used for such smaller–scope problems.