FACULTY OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND INFORMATION SYSTEM UNIVERSITY TECHNOLOGY MALAYSIA

ULP0010: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY SECTION:01

RESEARCH PROPOSAL: A SCHEDULING PROBLEM FOR ROSTERING ONCALL DOCTORS USING HYBRID IN GA WITH PSO

NAME: ZANARIAH BINTI ZAINUDIN MATRIC NO: MC 103058 SUPERVISOR NAME: DR. AZURAH A.SAMAH

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

1.1

Overview

Personnel scheduling, or rostering, is the process of constructing work timetables for its staff so that an organization can satisfy the demand for its goods or services. The first part of this process involves determining the number of staff, with particular skills, needed to meet the service demand. Individual staff members are allocated to shifts so as to meet the required staffing levels at different times, and duties are then assigned to individuals for each shift. All industrial regulations associated with the relevant workplace agreements must be observed during the process. It is extremely difficult to find good solutions to these highly constrained and complex problems and even more difficult to determine optimal solutions that minimize costs, meet employee preferences, distribute shifts equitably among employees and satisfy all the workplace constraints.

Wren (1996) defined scheduling as below:

The placing, subject to constraints, of resources into slots in a pattern. One may seek to minimize some objective, or simply to obtain a feasible allocation. Often the resources will rotate through a roster

Staff scheduling in any business, particularly in healthcare industry is usually a challenging and tiresome task due to rapid changes in business rules, shortage of healthcare professional as well as budget constraints. The person-in charge performing this function will have to keep track all employees, distributing hours fairly and avoiding collisions.

Individual staff members are allocated to shifts so as to meet the required staffing levels at different times, and duties are then assigned to individuals for each shift. It is extremely difficult to find good solutions to these highly constrained and complex problems and even more difficult to determine optimal solutions that minimize costs, meet employee preferences, distribute shifts fairly among employees and satisfy all the workplace constraints.

In many organizations, people involved in developing scheduling need decision support tools to help provide the right employees at the right time and at the right cost while achieving a high level of employee job satisfaction.

1.2

Problem Background

Most of organizations have put many interests in optimization and efficiency by focusing on developing effective schedules. Even though computerization and mathematics techniques such as Mathematical Programming using linear programming to satisfy a lot of workplaces, many organizations still use manual scheduling to satisfy both organization needs as well as employee statisfaction.

In healthcare organizations, the staff usually spends 10 to 20 hours each month to plan a good schedule. When the well planned schedule does not meet the needs at a certain point of event, a new schedule is created which agitate the prior schedule. Finally, it is difficult to determine the quality of the schedule due to the constraints and the number of decision making. Therefore, creating an optimal schedule for on-call doctor also will be reduce the time spent on each scheduling and making changes to staff. This enables the staff who create the schedule (called as the captain) to do other management stuff at hospital.

This research focuses on-call doctor scheduling at one specific department of a

department is the schedule does not have the fairness among senior doctor and houseman doctor, which is also called bias. The senior doctor does not have many oncall duties meanwhile the houseman always get their on-call duties in whole week which is seems unfair. Scheduling using computerized method and Genetic Algorithm (GA) in this research is to generate an optimal fair on-call doctor schedule.

Assigning one or more doctors is most problematic task in the night-morning shift. To ensure on-call doctors reliability of a work schedule, information regarding oncall scheduling must be well informed to all doctors. This enable the doctor to acknowledge and to work accordingly in handling accidents and emergencies cases at given time. Currently, scheduling problem in Malaysia public hospital is being done manually. This creates to many flaws happen which is due to lack of required information, and poor communication among the staff.

1.3

Problem Statement

Scheduling problem has been a subject that is being studied broadly by both academician and practitioners, over the years. Scheduling concepts are varied due to sophisticated and challenging real world scenarios in management system. Moreover, the importance of solving scheduling problems has triggered various approaches or techniques to solve these scheduling problems.

In order to develop a good scheduling model, it is crucial to comprehend the problem and to identify characteristics of potential techniques. Work schedule in the hospital currently generated manually by spending several days working on it. The work schedule are generated a month in advanced, have no past historical record do not include implicit needs of medical-staff regarding the promotion of work safety and work-family conciliation.

The motivation to undergo this research is that creating a schedule is not easy as it look. To establish work schedule for medical staff is a challenging tailor-made task

that does not respond to a general pattern given the complexity of such a departments structure. This complexity is due to a number of factors variability and unpredictability of patient demand, ward size, work mode, and type of on-call doctors.

Firstly, demand variability and unpredictability of patient demand is based on the variability in the length of patient stay and the degree of variation in the manning requirement over a working week. Secondly, ward size where it measured by the number of staff of the hospital.

Thirdly, the work mode combines shifts and duties. The type of work does not differ from what would be expected in a pediatric department. Below are some of general characteristics of the service are given. The working modes of doctors differ depending on whether the day is a working day or a holiday. For example, Saturdays, Sundays, local, regional and national holidays, Christmas Eve and New Years Eve are all categorized as holidays. Work during holidays is organized as a 24 h duty period (starting at 10 a.m.).

Lastly, type of on-call doctor means that complexity of skill mix measured in terms of the degree of variation in staff grades and the complexity of the manning requirement specification. For example, senior doctor, junior doctor and also houseman ship doctor.

In order to answer the issue raised above, the following research questions are outlined:

i.

What are complexities to build the work schedule?

ii. iii. iv.

What are the constraints of the on-call doctor scheduling? Will the algorithm find a solution of a given constraint? Is the proposed algorithm can produce a better work schedule?

1.4

Objectives

The objectives for this research are:

i.

To identify the policies and procedures involved in scheduling on-call doctors in Malaysia public hospital.

ii. iii. iv. v. vi. vii.

To review the criteria in scheduling techniques for on-call doctors. To investigate problems of manual scheduling problem. To identify factor involved in scheduling on-call doctors. To model the objective and constraint of the Hybrid GA-PSO. To develop a computerized scheduling using Hybrid GA-PSO. To evaluate the Hybrid GA-PSO based algorithm with manual scheduling to evaluate the proposed algorithm.

1.5

Scopes

The scopes of this study are:

investigation and data collection are done to obtain information related to Malaysian hospitals and services to the Malaysian community. The case study of this research is at Hospital Sultanah Aminah. ii. Focusing on Genetic Algorithm techniques and operations to form the objective functions and combine it with a possible optimization technique. iii. Modeling of Hybrid GA-PSO is based on selected case study.

CHAPTER 2

LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1

Overview

Scheduling problem exist in many service industries especially in healthcare industry. This chapter presents literature reviews about scheduling, scheduling problem types, scheduling processes, staff scheduling and background of case study of Hospital Sultanah Aminah. In this chapter, background study of public hospital in Malaysia is presented to give reader a clear understanding of Malaysian healthcare system and procudure.

2.2

General about Scheduling

Staff scheduling has been addressed by personnel managers, operations researchers and computer scientists for more than 40 years. The domain often covers staffing, budgeting and short-term scheduling problems. Although these fields each have different time horizons, they are strongly interrelated. The scheduling of hospital personnel is particularly challenging because of different staffing needs on different days and shifts. Unlike many other organisations, healthcare institutions work around the clock. Irregular shift work has an effect on the staff well being and job satisfaction (Mueller and McCloskey, 1990; Oldenkamp, 1992). The extent to which the staff roster

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satisfies the staff can impact upon the working environment (Akerstedt, 1985; Kostreva and Genevier, 1989; Monk, 1986; Monk and Folkard, 1992; Wilkinson and Allison, 1989).

Until recently, most personnel scheduling problems in hospitals were solved manually. This is sometimes called self-scheduling in the literature (e.g. Miller, 1984; Ringl and Dotson, 1989; Silvestro and Silvestro, 2000). Scheduling by hand used to be a very time consuming task. Planners had no automatic tool to test the quality of a constructed schedule. They made use of very straightforward constraints on working time and idle time in the recurring process.

In fact, many of the hospitals with computerised scheduling systems are not exploiting the full range of capability that is possible. Scheduling editing features are often used but automatic schedule generation features are still not common. The importance of a systematic approach to create good timetables is very high, especially in healthcare, where it is unacceptable not to fully support patient care needs and staff requirements. Automated approaches hold significant potential for improving the timetabling process and the quality of those timetables. Mathematical or heuristic approaches can easily produce a number of solutions, they can report upon the quality of schedules and they can try to divide the work evenly among personnel. One of the most significant benefits of automating the personnel scheduling process is a very considerable time-saving for the administrative staff involved.

Although the main overall goal of hospital personnel scheduling and other employee scheduling problems is the same, the problems often differ considerably and so do the approaches to solve them. In this thesis, we concentrate on On-call doctor scheduling. However, we have to point out that the term scheduling has several different meanings across the literature in table 2.1 below:

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Table 2.1: Definition of scheduling Author Wren (1996) Definition of Scheduling The placing, subject to constraints, of resources into slots in a pattern. One may seek to minimise some objective, or simply to obtain a feasible allocation. Anthony (1995) The allocation, subject to constraints, of resources to object begin placed in spacetime, in such a way as to minimise the total cost of some set of the resources used. The Free Dictionary (Online Dictionary) A list of times of departures and arrivals; a timetable: a bus schedule; a schedule of guided tours.

A plan for performing work or achieving an objective, specifying the order and allotted time for each part: finished the project on schedule.

2.3

Staff Scheduling

Staff scheduling is very complicated work for each month especially in healthcare sectors. This is important jobs to create a good schedule to get the staff satisfactory with their work and be able to create a good working atmosphere. There are two types of scheduling in staff scheduling which called the cyclical scheduling and non-cyclical

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scheduling. The next section explained more about the cyclical scheduling and noncyclical scheduling.

2.3.1

Cyclical Scheduling

This approach has some serious drawbacks for practical applications but it has received some discussion in the literature over the years. This type of schedule is common if the day is partitioned in distinct shifts and if the personnel requirements per day and per shift obey a cyclical pattern. Cyclical scheduling is also referred to as fixed scheduling, while non-cyclical scheduling is sometimes called flexible (Silvestro and Silvestro, 2000).

Figure 2.1: Example of cyclical scheduling

According to Warner (1976), cyclical schedules offer several advantages. Personnel know their schedule a long time in advance, the same blocks are used repeatedly, the work is divided evenly, and unhealthy work rotations are avoided because it is common to apply forward rotation. Forward rotation is met when a schedule includes no shift starting at an earlier time than a shift on the day before. Megeath (1978) proposed cyclical 7-day patterns of shifts and days off to allow for balanced shift coverage. There are clear benefits but cyclical schedules do not have high levels of flexibility. They cannot easily address flexible work regulations, fluctuating personnel demands and personal preferences. Also, cyclical scheduling requires a higher level decision to provide a precise number of skilled personnel members and strict

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personnel tasks. Working according to cyclical schedules is impossible if the problem is not stated in a very precise and correct manner.

Burns and Koop (1987), developed a cyclical model for manpower scheduling with strict specifications on consecutive working days and days off. It takes only three different shift types into consideration. The model is not flexible enough to deal with complex modern nurse rostering problems. Hung (1991), presents a cyclical pattern for short-term nurse scheduling. He introduces 4-day workweeks with 10-hour shifts. Hung states that long shifts have benefits if the overlaps are strategically timed. Hospitals can cope with daily peak overloads, the communication between consecutive shifts is improved and overtime is reduced. Hung allows downward substitution in order to fill shortages for certain skill categories. The approach provides a permanent-shift system; this is a schedule in which nurses do not rotate. The advantages are that the people who work at the same time forma real team. There are also benefits for the social activities of the personnel members. For the scheduling problem, it requires the consideration of days on and off only, which reduces the complexity of the problem considerably. The constraints on the algorithm are coverage constraints and some time-related constraints: three free days per week and at least a number of free weekends per set of weeks.

2.3.2

Non-Cyclical Scheduling

Non-cyclic scheduling will generate a new roster for the nurse to follow in every scheduling period. This schedule will be differently from one to another. This scheduling is applicable to the healthcare institutions that hire any part time nurses to work with them. Cacchiani (2010) used this scheduling to compare the train timetabling

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and applied the scheduling to the problem. They have used the formulation in non-cyclic timetabling known as maximum-profit collection as their main consideration.

Figure 2.2: Example of non-cyclical scheduling

2.4

Advantages of creating Optimal Scheduling

The advantages of creating staff scheduling are:

I.

An optimal schedule has an extra benefit such as great savings where it can reduce the staff salaries by not assigning many staff at one time and doing nothing at all. It also will cut the expensive for the part time worker due to other staff absence during the workdays. It also will make a good working atmosphere where can reduce a lot of stress.

II.

Many big organizations have many issues about staff discipline and also staff absenteeism. The staff absenteeism will make the organization lost a huge profit due to lack of services especially in healthcare services. This problem can be deal by giving a fair workload in scheduling.

III.

It also will increase the staff satisfaction by provide an optimal schedule with more choice or work shift. This will made the organization productivity became higher.

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IV.

Healthcare sector have many issues with service quality. In healthcare, the workload of the nurses and doctors are so burdensome and it will make the nurses and doctors became stress in workplace which can lead to medical error where it can be dangerous to the patient. If an optimal work schedule are been used in healthcare sector in Malaysia, the nurses and doctors will get more time to rest.

2.5

Summary Using Hybrid GA-PSO in On-call doctor Scheduling

As is known, every technique has its pro and con. Taking its consideration of each good element to a combination will produce a better outcome. Hence, generally, hybrid techniques are more efficient to solve NSP in this decade. As cited there is always the possibility of hybridizing early approaches or some features of early approaches (Burke etc al, 2002).

We choose Hybrid GA with PSO as the main approach in view of hopefully that it can deliver the good result in a shorter time compare to the others approach. In the case at hand, we will combine two global optimization algorithms, i.e., GA and PSO, as PSO and GA both work with an initial population of solutions and combining the searching abilities of both methods seems to be a reasonable approach. Originally, PSO functions according to knowledge of social interaction, and all individuals are taken into account in each generation. On the contrary, GA simulates evolution and some individuals are selected while some others are eliminated from generation to generation. Taking advantage of the compensatory property of GA and PSO, we propose a new algorithm that combines the evolutionary natures of both (denoted as GA-PSO).

PSO has no genetic operation such crossover and mutation, and it determines the searches according to its own pace. The particle has also another important characteristic, which is memory. Compared with GA, the information sharing mechanisms of PSO are very different. In GA, chromosomes share information each other, so the movement of the whole population is a more even moving to the optimal

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area. In PSO, only gBest (or lBest) provides information for other particles, which is one-way flows of information. The whole searching and updating process is following the process of the optimal solution at present. Compared with GA, in most cases, the convergence of all particles to be optimal solutions may be faster CHAPTER 3

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

3.1

Overview

Chapter three has discussed about all the research methodology in this research. The first section is started by operational framework, and followed by data set collection and development of the algorithm. Finally the algorithm will be validated to get the best solution for on-call doctor schedule. Hardware and software will be used in the implementation stage is also been discussed at last section.

3.2

Research Framework

Figure 3.1 below show the research framework for scheduling for on-call doctor. Figure 3.1 and 3.2 depicts the proposed research procedure and research design which includes the following four main stages:

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Stage Stage Stage Stage

1: 2: 3: 4:

Preliminary Investigation (Chapter 1 and 2) Design and Development of Algorithm (Chapter 3) Implementation (Chapter 4) Result and Discussion (Chapter 5)

START

Literature Review STAGE 1: PRELIMINARY INVESTIGATION

Interview

Data Collection STAGE 2: DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF ALGORITHM Design and Development of Algorithm

Testing and Validation

STAGE 3: IMPLEMENTATION

No Satisfied? Yes Result

END

Figure 3.1 Research Procedure

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CHAPTER 4

INITIAL FINDINGS

4.1

Overview

In this research, there are many important findings that have been gathered during the preliminary investigation. These findings are the criterias and steps taken to complete an optimal in current health organizations. The criteria have been gathered from the literature review. These findings will be used together with the data to model our algorithm then to develop our Hybrid-GA with PSO algorithm.

4.2

Preliminary Investigation: Interview Session

Interview session is the method that has been used during preliminary investigation to get a deep background problem in this field. It is the most widely used qualitative

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research. There are a few types of interview that are informal, semi-structured and open-ended questions. All of these types of interview have been used during our

interview sessions depend on the requirement needed from the respondent and also their status and capability.

Spontaneous questions will be presented by the interviewer if there are appropriate matters and needs to be asked during the informal interview session. During this

session, a lot of new information can be collected from respondent because they will give any feedback due to the perspective and point of view. An outline will be

generating first if a semi-structured interview need to be apply while open-ended questions interview consists of set of questions that already prepared before the session.

4.3

Expected findings

The expected finding of this research is by creating an optimal scheduling for on-call doctor using Hybrid GA with PSO. Firstly we have started developing computer program using MATLAB using GA and the secondly using different algorithm i.e. Particle Swarm Optimization. Once it is completed, we will proceed with the third algorithm i.e. Hybrid GA PSO.

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