A Study Of Cost Effective Scheduling Of Nurses Based On The Domain Transformation Method

This paper discusses and analyses the tradeoff between the flexibility afforded with greater number of staff and the implied cost of employing extra staff in the context of the nurse-scheduling problem. If the number of staff is constant, our study allows quantification of the degree of pressure put on the staff resulting from the schedules that do not satisfy their preferences for shift allocation. We present a practical approach, based on our domain transformation methodology that achieves good quality schedules without high computational requirements.