Nurse scheduling with lunch break assignments in operating suites

Motivated by the need to make frequent changes in operating suites, this paper presents a highly scalable and efficient solution framework for scheduling nurses in operating suites over the day. This framework consists of two core optimization models that are necessary for scheduling OR nurses in the clinic. The first model addresses the multi-objective optimization problem of assigning nurses to upcoming surgery cases based on their specialties and competency levels. The second model is designed to generate lunch break assignments for the nurses once their caseloads are determined. The latter problem has been largely overlooked by the research community despite its importance. Because the multi-objective model is too large to solve using commercial software, we developed both a column generation algorithm and a two-phase swapping heuristic to find feasible assignments in a fast manner. For both approaches, initial solutions are obtained with a restricted model and lunch breaks are scheduled in a post-processing step. Experiments were conducted to determine the value of the models and the performance of the algorithms using real data provided by MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. The results show that the two approaches can produce implementable daily schedules in a matter of minutes for instances with over 100 nurses, 50 surgery cases and 33 operating rooms.