Development of a doctor scheduling system: a constraint satisfaction and penalty minimisation scheduling model

Abstract

Doctor scheduling is a complex, costly and time-consuming exercise. This study develops a constraint satisfaction and penalty minimisation scheduling model for meeting ‘hard constraints' and minimises the cost of violating ‘soft constraints', i.e. the user inputs, the total number of doctors to be scheduled, the maximum penalty to be met, and the minimum number of doctors to be assigned per shift. The algorithm creates a schedule which checks against all the constraints. The total schedule penalty associated with the constraint violations should be less than or equal to the user input penalty. If this condition is met, the schedule gets produced as the final and near-optimal solution. The model is managed to create a near optimal schedule with the minimal rule violations. However, it is challenging to provide a schedule with no rule violations. Such a situation is shown by the amount of computational time required to create a zero-penalty schedule, hours or even days needed to create a zero-penalty schedule. The system creates a schedule for a short period (weekly schedule) to promote flexibility; however, such a system does not promote fairness. Fairness is achieved through a cyclic schedule with rotations equal to the total number of doctors being scheduled. The system is managed to create a streamlined and flexible working environment and helped to improve the quality of healthcare. An optimization protocol can be incorporated into the system to reduce the search space and get the best optimal schedule since it is possible to get many schedules under the same user-defined parameters.