Simulated Annealing Algorithm for Daily Nursing Care Scheduling Problem

Nursing, with the primary mission to provide quality services to patients, is accompanied by a serial of activities like patients assessment, outcomes identification for patients. In general, there has been less attention on ensuring that nurses provide nursing cares in a timely and accurate fashion. Consequently, in this paper, considering the similarity to the traditional job shop scheduling problems, we will model the daily nursing care scheduling problems and propose an efficient scheduling method based on simulated annealing algorithm. By the comparison of several nursing care plans obtained by the dispatching-rule based methods (which have been recognized to be the implementation of human thoughts), the proposed method is evaluated to be applicable to the nursing care scheduling problems (providing comprehensive, coordinated and cost effective nursing cares to patients).