Multi-Skill Shift Design for Norwegian Hospitals

The shift design problem consists in finding a suitable set of shifts which covers the work demand for a planning horizon. For labor intensive organizations, finding a good match between the predicted workload and the scheduled workforce work capacity is crucial. In a multi-skill shift design problem, the model must reflect the skill attributes of the employees and the time-dependent demand of each skill type. For hospitals, a number of constraints and objectives complicate the picture. In this paper we introduce models which reflect many of the challenges faced by planners at two Norwegian reference hospitals. Experiments using mixed-integer programming solvers show promising results, and near-optimal solutions are found within a few minutes