A combined AHP-GP model for nurse scheduling

Scheduling emergency nurses is a complex task, which considers a large number of rules (often conflicting) related to various aspects such as limits on the number of consecutive work hours, number of day and night shifts that should be worked by each nurse, nurse staffing requirements according to seniority levels for the day and night shifts, restrictions on the number of consecutive day and night shifts assigned, vacation periods, weekend off requests, and fair distribution of responsibilities among the nurses. A goal programming (GP) model that accommodates both hard and soft constraints for a monthly planning horizon will proposed. The hard constraints should be adhered to strictly, whereas the soft constraints can be violated when necessary. In this study the relative importance values of the soft constraints have been computed by the analytical hierarchy process (AHP), which are used as coefficients of the deviations from the soft constraints in the objective function.