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Modeling And Analysis Of Or Nurse Scheduling Using Mathematical Programming And Simulation, Clayton Tontarski

Theses

Nurse scheduling is a complex problem. The act of assigning each nurse to a specific shift for each day of a scheduling horizon, while ensuring to fulfill the demand of the operating rooms (ORs) is very time consuming. Current methods used in practice often develop solutions that are suboptimal, resulting in low nurse utilization, low nurse satisfaction, patient delays, or overtime pay for nurses. In this paper we propose an approach that utilizes simulation, simulation-based optimization, and mathematical programming as tools for solving complex nurse scheduling problems. We discuss how the simulation-based optimization generates multiple alternative shift plans, defined as …