Cyclic shift scheduling with on-call duties for emergency medical services

Tristan Becker (), Pia Mareike Steenweg () and Brigitte Werners ()
Additional contact information
Tristan Becker: Ruhr University Bochum
Pia Mareike Steenweg: Ruhr University Bochum
Brigitte Werners: Ruhr University Bochum

Health Care Management Science, 2019, vol. 22, issue 4, No 7, 676-690

Abstract: Abstract In workforce scheduling for emergency medical services, it is important to ensure sufficient coverage at all time. Thus, planning has to consider unpredictable employee absences. To hedge against this type of uncertainty, on-call duties can be assigned to employees. In practice, these are often assigned ex-post based on the regular schedule. Little literature on workforce scheduling for ambulances or the planning of on-call duties exists. We present new set covering based integer programming formulations for cyclic stint-based staff scheduling with on-call duties. It is desirable for employees to work on consecutive days, called a stint, with a subsequent recovery period. On-call duties can be individually scheduled in-between two stints. Our model formulations integrate different cycle times for regular and on-call duties. A simple schedule that repeats quickly is devised for regular duties, while the on-call duty schedule rotates after each cycle to ensure fairness. The proposed models are applied to a local German emergency medical services provider. Using our stint-based model formulations, the planning complexity has been greatly reduced and reasonably large problem instances can be solved to optimality. Employee preferences, such as fairness, less work on weekends and longer recovery times, were taken into account to a high degree.

Keywords: Personnel planning; Emergency medical services; Cyclical scheduling; Tactical planning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10729-018-9451-9 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:hcarem:v:22:y:2019:i:4:d:10.1007_s10729-018-9451-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10729

DOI: 10.1007/s10729-018-9451-9

Access Statistics for this article

Health Care Management Science is currently edited by Yasar Ozcan

More articles in Health Care Management Science from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().