Abordagem híbrida de otimização para elaboração de escalas de trabalho do pessoal de enfermagem

Abstract

In the personnel rostering problem, there is concern in dimensioning the workforce, allocating and assigning tasks to this workforce, respecting the legislation of each sector, union agreements and attending (when possible) the individuals employees’ demands. In the healthcare area, the complexity of the personnel rostering problem is to elaborate rosters that comply with the internal norms of the institution and the external ones, ensuring that there is no overload of tasks and, most importantly, reducing operating costs without harming patients care and other services. To ensure quality patient care, the head nurse in each sector is responsible for preparing monthly nursing staff rosters, so that there is no excess or staff shortage. When done manually, or without using some support tool, this task consumes excessive time of the responsible for preparing it, often resulting in an unequal scale that does not meet nurses' wishes. Thus, the present work aims to develop and apply a computational tool for the construction of monthly work rosters for the nursing staff, through a hybrid metaheuristic approach formed by the combination of the metaheuristic Simulated Annealing and the Clustering Search method. The computational tool developed has been evaluated using test problems from the literature and real cases from a hospital located in the city of Caxias do Sul, reaching satisfactory results compared to those found in the literature, in addition to having generated feasibles schedulings for the hospital institution.