Scheduling Software for Large Organisations?

DrCJM asks: "My wife works for a large hospital here in Australia, where her main role is building, managing and (where needed!) enforcing a schedule for all the junior doctors. This schedule covers several campuses, different specialty streams, different expertise levels, and so on. I'm sure there's a scheduling software package out there that can do all of the basic scheduling much faster than their current method of sitting down with very large bits of paper and lots of coloured pens. What software have Slashdot readers encountered that might do the job? Open Source would be great, but commercial efforts are acceptable too."

Comments

If commercial is ok too

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Hate to say it, but this is the *only* thing Microsoft did right in Exchange/Outlook/Pocket Outlook- and took it to extremes.

Extreme Silliness perhaps- It's possible, for instance, in a properly set up Exchange/Outlook system, to view everybody's calendars, schedule a meeting, invite everybody to the meeting, and have them synchronize down to their PDAs, which remind them not only of that meeting, but also of the next one, which means that at the end of the meeting you have x # of people, all of whose PDAs are ringing to tell them it's time to move to the next room.

Seems to me it would be good to help schedule loades of people, and if you have a wifi network, automagically synchronize PDAs over the wifi network to inform people where to go next.

What does your scheduling problem look like?

[zhiwenchong]

If your scheduling problem can be quantified (i.e. expressed as an LP), you can use this to solve for the optimal schedule given all sorts of constraints.

GAMS - General Algebraic Modeling System.

They use this for airline crew scheduling and all sorts of other stuff.

Also, look at this AMPL - A Modeling Language for Mathematical Programming

I hope I haven't misunderstood your question though... (all you may need is iCal.... or maybe not.)

too many "fuzzy" variables

[bte]

My wife is the same (works as a nurse in an Australian hospital) and asked me a similar question about 12-18 months ago. At the time she was sick of always getting a bum roster because she wasn't buddies with the people who worked out the roster. I originally thought that it would be easy, just put in a bunch of variables and it would spit out an optimal roster. Then I actually started thinking about it and there are a lot of variables that are hard to actually quantify into hard values to put into some sort of program.

Some of the inputs would include:

* shift lengths - staff on this ward can work either 8,10 or 12 hour shifts
* number of shifts - staff can be anywhere from 1 shift per fortnight up to 10
* time between shifts - union mandates that staff must have X number of hours between successive shifts
* number of staff required during certain periods of the day - daytime needs more staff than nightime (when patients are sleeping)

I know what you're thinking, most of those variables you can put down into hard facts, true, but ones you can't are stuff like:

* each staff gets X red requests per roster and Y yellow requests. Red requests are days the staff would REALLY like to have off (eg. family members Birthday or similar). Yellow requests are days that staff would prefer to have off if given a choice.
* some staff prefer to work weekends, some don't. This is based on personal preference of having time off on the weekend (to spend with family) or working on the weekend and getting a higher rate of pay. Same goes for night (eg. graveyard) shifts.
* A program could spit out a roster that technically fits the criteria, but from a human perspective is less workable. Eg. working alternate morning then evening shifts all week. The better option would be to work ALL morning or ALL evening shifts.
* Some staff don't get along with other staff. I think they need to grow up a bit, but this does indeed happen, some staff refuse to work with others they don't get along with. If they somehow get accidentally rostered on with someone they don't like, they take a sick day (which costs the hospital as they have to get temp staff in to cover).

These are just a few things that come to mind. In the ned I realised that it was probably a situation where a program wouldn't be able to do it as well as a person. The reason is simply because there were to many personal factors to take into account and that these factors would change from one ward to the next based on the people in each ward.