A decision support tool to plan shifts in a home for the aged

In this work we devise and implement a decision support system for a service company, managing the personnel shifts in a hospital for aged persons. In particular, we formulate a mathematical model that embeds labour regulations, trade union agreements and operational customs in terms of hard and soft constraints. Soft constraints and costs are treated in a multi-objective fashion by a preference modeling module exploiting the Analytic Hierarchy Process. Finally, we present a tabu-search algorithm used to initialize an open source linear programming solver and we compare the results obtained by the optimization algorithm with the manual planning.