Nurse scheduling by forward Dynamic Programming approach / Siti Aishah Sarman, Siti Farahanah Zaki and Nik Nur Salsabila Ahmad

Nurse Scheduling Problem (NSP) is a complex problem and it is a difficult process to
construct an effective schedule, which must consider all of the hospital's requirements
and nurses' preferences. However, most hospitals and healthcare facilities construct
the schedules manually which does not acknowledge the hospital's requirements.
Therefore, they have difficulties in generating the schedule due to the issues that crop
up after. Hence, a study on NSP is conducted to find the suitable method to solve NSP
compared to manually made schedule. The purpose of this study is to analyze current
manually made schedule with respect to the total day shift, total night shift and total
working day and to determine the maximum working day and night shifts for each
nurse by Dynamic Programming (DP) approach. This complex problem is divided to
13 states and four stages. The problem is solved recursively where the solution from
previous stage will be used in the next stage. For instance, the solution obtained in
stage one is carry forward to stage two where it is used to find the solution for stage
two and this process is repeated for the next stage three and four until the final optimal
solution is obtained. The result from this study indicates that DP method is compatible
to find the maximum working day and night shifts for each nurse in solving NSP.