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.)