Physician Scheduling using Constraint Satisfaction Programming

Physician scheduling is a critical task that impacts the quality of patient care, staff satisfaction, and operational efficiency in healthcare institutions. The traditional approach to physician scheduling is manual and time-consuming, which can result in errors, staff burnout, and suboptimal schedules. To address these challenges, researchers have turned to optimization techniques like CSP, which has shown promise in solving physician scheduling problems. This paper reviews the existing literature on CSP for physician scheduling and highlights the benefits and limitations of this approach. CSP's benefits include generating schedules quickly and efficiently, incorporating complex constraints and preferences, and handling changes and disruptions in real time. However, CSP also has some limitations, such as the need for a formalized model and the fact that it may not always generate the most intuitive schedules. Overall, the findings suggest that CSP is a promising approach to physician scheduling that can produce high-quality schedules while minimizing staff burnout and improving operational efficiency.