A Novel Approach for the Nurse Scheduling Problem

This study considers nurse scheduling problem in seven-days-three-week operations under an arrangement called 4-day workweek. A computer-assisted scheduling program has been proposed to schedule nurses with multiple shifts. The program has been developed in Delphi 7.0 and includes a scheduling module which schedules nurses for three weeks on the basis of the weekday and weekend shift nursing requirements. The program is significantly beneficial for scheduling of large numbers of nurses and providing optimal three weekly schedules in a reasonable time and provides a faster response, a reduced cost as compared to human experts and a number of practical features.