Artificial intelligence technique for planning duties in hospital - preliminary results

Scheduling doctors duties in a hospital are complicated and time-consuming tasks. The person responsible for creating a duty timetable is facing one major problem when allocating doctors to time periods: the agreement between several constraining (and often mutually excluding) requirements must be found. In this paper a solution methodology for the monthly duty assignment of doctors is presented. The typical problem is described in detail, along with specific hospital environment, from which datasets for experiments have been taken. A hybrid approach that utilizes strengths of a few artificial intelligence techniques was used to solve the problem. In particular, a population of initial solutions is generated heuristically and then improved using evolutionary algorithm. Experimental results are presented along with a discussion on the computational efficiency, operational acceptability and quality of the solutions.