Personnel scheduling: The starting point for solving real cases

Personnel scheduling problems are widely studied both by the scientific community and by the human resource managers of the companies. The financial impact of the decisions, the welfare of the employees, or more subjective concepts like “fairness” and “balance”, turn this case into much more than just a routine problem. When it comes to medical personnel scheduling, additional difficulties can be found, such as uninterrupted work (24 hours per day, 7 days per week), or the quality of service that has to be ensured. The work presented in this paper was based on the rules defined in INRCII — Second International Nurse Rostering Competition — but always with the vision of creating the necessary basis for the future development of an automatic and optimized generic personnel scheduling software.