Projects

• BeAct

   

  Research Area: Staff rostering

  Funding: , EUR 0,-

   

  The aim of the project BeAct is to automate shift design/scheduling for hospitals. Shift design/scheduling is the process of making a schedule containing shifts that cover the demand for workers while satisfying a set of other requirements. The requirements are many, and the number of possible solutions too vast for a manual approach-finding a solution manually is possible, but it is unlikely to be an optimal solution. Part of the challenge we have tackled is to formalize the set of requirements in a mathematical model-it is critical for the optimization to include all of the actual requirements, and not only simplified versions or just those that are easy to formulate.

  In BeAct, we have used a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) approach. Through a continuous dialog with several Norwegian hospitals we have built the model with variables, constraints, and objectives.

  Some of the objectives included are: minimization of personnel cost; minimization of the total number of different shifts; matching with the contracted working hours; even distribution of excess capacity. Constraints included are: a maximum of different shifts to be used during different periods; overlap between shifts; a common leaving time for all day shifts; one main shift with most of the workers each day.

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• The Hospital Project

   

  Research Area: General health care planning and optimisation

  Funding: The Research Council of Norway, EUR 0,-

   

  HOSPITAL (Health care Optimisation Software for PlannIng, rosTering, And scheduLing) is a five year research project mainly funded by The Research Council of Norway. The industrial partners Gatsoft AS and DIPS ASA are co-funding the project. The main objective in the project is to further develop and disseminate world leading competence in high-performance, robust and adaptable optimization methods for decision support in health care planning software. The competence is needed to meet strategic goals of higher efficiency and service levels in the health sector, and to facilitate innovation in the tool vendor industry. We shall focus on two specific, highly challenging, important planning tasks: personnel rostering and surgery scheduling. Optimization methods will be incrementally developed and assessed via prototypes. A generic optimization library and implementation guide will ensure wide dissemination and exploitation of the methodology, also outside of the health sector.
  

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