-- An Interactive Constraint Based Nurse Scheduler.pdf

INSTITUT FUR INFORMATIKLehr- und Forschungseinheit furProgrammier- und ModellierungssprachenOettingenstrae 67, D{80538 Munchen INTERDIP { An Interactive Constraint BasedNurse SchedulerSlim Abdennadher, Hans Schlenker appeared in The First International Conference and Exhibition on The Practical Applica-tion of Constraint Technologies and Logic Programming, PACLP99, London, 1999rmatik.uni-muenchen.de/publikationenForschungsbericht/Research Report PMS-FB-1999-2, January 1999 INTERDIP{ An Interactive Constraint BasedNurse SchedulerSlim AbdennadherComputer Science Institute, University of MunichOettingenstrae 67, 80538 Munchen, GermanySlim.Abdennadher@informatik.uni-muenchen.deHans SchlenkeryTechnical University of BerlinFranklinstrae 28/29, 10587 Berlin, Germanyhans@cs.tu-berlin.dermatik.uni-muenchen.de/~interdipAbstractIn every hospital a duty roster for the nursing sta of each wardmust be created each month. The roster has to take into account severalrequirements such as minimal allocation of a station, legal regulationsand wishes of the personnel. This planning is very complex and isstill done manually. INTERDIP is an advanced industrial prototypethat supports semi-automatic creation of such rosters. Using constraintbased programming, INTERDIP imitates certain aspects of manualplanning. With INTERDIP a roster can be created interactively withinsome minutes instead of by hand some hours. Additionally, it mostlyproduces better results. INTERDIP was developed in collaborationwith Siemens Nixdorf. It was presented at the Systems'98 Computerexhibition in Munich and several companies have inquired to marketour system.1 IntroductionMany real-life problems lead to combinatorial search, computationally a veryintensive task. Unfortunately, no general method exists for solving this kindof problems eciently. The automatic generation of duty rosters for hospitalwards falls under this class of problems.INTERDIP is an acronym for the German \Interaktiver Dienstplaner".y