An interactive physician scheduling tool

根据我们去年完成的Engage项目EGP 462181-13，我们发现在人员调度方面存在许多挑战，包括数据标准化、数据评估、人员分配和约束证明。在为可用医生分配可用时间段时有许多不同的限制。事实上，没有一次性的调度可以满足所有的约束。由于只有手工工作，人工调度人员可能需要几天甚至几周的时间来调整来自相关人员的不同需求，以获得令人满意的调度方案。构建医师日程安排辅助工具是满足这一需求的一种很有希望的方法。交互式人员调度助理工具的目标是建立一个系统，该系统考虑了特殊约束条件下的特定绩效度量，并且每个交互都基于特定参数进行优化。

Based on the Engage Project EGP 462181-13 we completed last year, we find that there are many challenges in personnel scheduling including data standardization, data evaluations, personnel assignment, and constraint justifications. There are many different constraints in assigning available time slots to available physicians. The fact is that no one-time scheduling can meet all the constraints. With only manual work, human schedulers may take days or even weeks to adjust the different requirements from involved persons to acquire a satisfactory scheduling scheme. To build a physician scheduling assistant tool is a promising way to meet this requirement. The objective of an Interactive Personnel Scheduling Assistant Tool is to build a system for which particular measures of performance are considered with special constraints and each interaction is optimized based on specific parameters. General scheduling is a very challenging problem, normally called Non-Polynomial (NP) - hard problem. Therefore, the researchers in the world try hard to investigate variety of methods to improve the efficiency of scheduling algorithms. This is also the reason why there is no such practical scheduling software in the world until now. The proposed tool is a definitely value-adding product for the MetricAid Inc. The challenges are: 1) the algorithm itself is time-consuming; 2) some optimization tools are too complex to understand and learn to be applied to the real-world management; 3) effective and user-friendly interactions with the human schedulers; and 4) trade-offs accepted by human schedulers to consider as many as possible the physicians' requirements that are inherently conflicting with each other.