An Attempt to Extract Constraints in Care Worker Scheduling Problems

Abstract

Work schedules for staff in long-term care facilities are often created manually, taking a lot of time and effort. Methods for automatically generating work schedules have been widely studied; however, when implementing a system, constraints must be defined manually for each facility. Since the constraints vary greatly from one nursing care facility to another, interviews are required to define the constraints when introducing a work schedule generation system. This interviewing process is a heavy burden for facilities and is one of the causes that hinder the introduction of the system. This study proposes a method for automatically extracting constraints from past work schedules and generating work schedules using the extracted constraints. The proposed method extracts shift combinations using constraint templates and excludes exceptional combinations by considering margins. By eliminating exceptional combinations, it is possible to obtain constraints. Experiments have conducted for generating a work schedule using the extracted constraints and for comparing it with a work schedule created by a manager. The results confirmed that the proposed method can automatically extract constraints of a facility and generate a work schedule with the almost same number of violations as the manager's work schedule.