A new heuristic for shift work management

Abstract—Organising shifts, or work rosters, is a problem that affects a large number of businesses where staff are subject to some kind of work rotation or other. Researchers in the fields of Operations Research and Artificial Intelligence have devised several systems in an attempt to optimise the problem. This paper focuses on the problem of medical staff shift rotation at a hospital emergency department, and attempts to establish a method to automate its management by applying genetic algorithms. It also analyses one of the duty rosters that came out of the proposed solution. Index Terms—Heuristic, Rostering, Genetic Algorithms I