Grant: Engage Plus Grants Program

Based on the Engage Project EGP 462181-13 we completed last year, we find that there are many challenges in personnel scheduling including data standardization, data evaluations, personnel assignment, and constraint justifications. There are many different constraints in assigning available time slots to available physicians. The fact is that no one-time scheduling can meet all the constraints. With only manual work, human schedulers may take days or even weeks to adjust the different requirements from involved persons to acquire a satisfactory scheduling scheme. To build a physician scheduling assistant tool is a promising way to meet this requirement. The objective of an Interactive Personnel Scheduling Assistant Tool is to build a system for which particular measures of performance are considered with special constraints and each interaction is optimized based on specific parameters. General scheduling is a very challenging problem, normally called Non-Polynomial (NP) - hard problem. Therefore, the researchers in the world try hard to investigate variety of methods to improve the efficiency of scheduling algorithms. This is also the reason why there is no such practical scheduling software in the world until now. The proposed tool is a definitely value-adding product for the MetricAid Inc. The challenges are: 1) the algorithm itself is time-consuming; 2) some optimization tools are too complex to understand and learn to be applied to the real-world management; 3) effective and user-friendly interactions with the human schedulers; and 4) trade-offs accepted by human schedulers to consider as many as possible the physicians' requirements that are inherently conflicting with each other.