20th International Conference on Industrial, Engineering and Other Applications of Applied Intelligent Systems, Kyoto, Japan, 26 - 29 June 2007, vol.4570, pp.54-55
Nurse scheduling is a complex scheduling problem and involves generating a schedule for each nurse that consists of shift duties and days off within a short-term planning period. The problem involves multiple conflicting objectives such as satisfying demand coverage requirements and maximizing nurses' preferences subject to a variety of constraints imposed by legal regulations, personnel policies and many other hospital-specific requirements. The inherent nature of the nurse scheduling problem (NSP) bears vagueness of information on target values of hospital objectives and on personal preferences. Also, the ambiguity of the constraints is some source of uncertainty that needs to be treated in providing a high quality schedule. Taking these facts into account, this paper presents the application of Fuzzy Set Theory (FST) within the context of NSP and proposes a fuzzy goal programming model. To explore the viability of the proposed model, computational experiments are presented on a real world case problem.