A study of staff scheduling with the aim of maintaining the quality of nursing

1. (1)为了掌握这一调度问题，我们在2004年进行了一项调查。我们向在“东京福利导航”网站上注册的所有2380家家政服务机构发送了一份关于其员工调度的问卷。387家机构回复了问卷，回收率为17%。根据调查结果，我们对“家政服务人员调度”进行了建模，结果如下：当用户请求有时间限制的服务时，必须将工作时间有时间窗口限制的家政服务人员分配到这些服务中，以确保提供服务，同时考虑提供约束、行程时间和路线质量以及在调度周期内“每个用户的帮佣工作量和帮佣平衡”。(2)我们给出了一个家政人员调度问题的数学规划公式，并在公式中引入了特定日期所需家政人员数量的两种下界。然后，我们使用简单的启发式算法计算助手的数量，以确定该数字的上限。将边界与确定边界时获得的信息相结合，对于在制定详细的时间表之前为每天安排适当的助手非常有用。(3)我们在Microsoft Excel上开发了一个“家政人员日程安排支持系统”的原型，可以生成每天的日程安排。这个算法很简单，基于以子问题为中心的方法。护士调度我们还在Microsoft Excel上开发了一个“护士调度支持系统”的原型，通过基于子问题中心方法的护士调度算法解决了这个问题。

1. Home help staff scheduling(1) In order to grasp this scheduling problem, we conducted a survey in 2004. We sent a Questionnaire about their staff scheduling to all of the 2380 home help organizations registered on "Tokyo Welfare Navigation" website. 387 organizations responded the questionnaire (the collection percentage was 17%). We modeled "home help staff scheduling" based on this survey results, as follows : When services with time constraints are requested by users, helpers with time window constraints for their working hours must be assigned to these services in order to make sure that the services are provided, while considering provision constraints, traveling time and quality of routes as well as "helper's workloads and helper balance for each user" in a scheduling period have to be taken into consideration.(2) We show a mathematical programming formulation of the home help staff scheduling problem, and, in the formulation, introduce two types of lower bounds for the number of helpers needed on a specific day. We then calculate the number of helpers using a simple heuristic algorithm in order to determine the upper bound for the number. Combining the bounds with the information obtained when determining the bounds is shown to be useful for arranging the appropriate helpers for each day before making a detailed schedule.(3) We developed, on Microsoft Excel, a prototype of "home help staff scheduling support system" which can produce a schedule for each day. The algorithm for this is simple and is based on the Subproblem-centric approach.2. Nurse schedulingWe also developed, on Microsoft Excel, a prototype of "nurse scheduling support system" which solves the problem by our nurse scheduling algorithm based on the Subproblem-centric approach.