Scheduling of nurses using Constraint Satisfaction

Abstract

Hospitals in India are short of nursing staffs. The scenario got even worse as the number of hospitals are not adequate to support the growing population of India. Usually, the hospitals treat more patients than its capacity. Nurses are the human resource that is essential for any hospitals for their daily procedures. In general, this human resource is scarce and needed to be utilized in optimal manner. The types of nurses and their working hours in India are regulated by Medical Council of India, New Delhi. Scheduling nurses is highly constraint and require a lot of effort to schedule manually. Since a lot of constraints are required to be checked, a constraint satisfaction problem approach is a natural choice. The Nurse Scheduling Problem (NSP) is formulated in this work as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) so that scheduling can be automated using any object-oriented programming language.