Master physician scheduling problem

We study a real-world problem arising from the operations of a hospital service provider, which we term the master physician scheduling problem. It is a planning problem of assigning physicians' full range of day-to-day duties (including surgery, clinics, scopes, calls, administration) to the defined time slots/shifts over a time horizon, incorporating a large number of constraints and complex physician preferences. The goals are to satisfy as many physicians' preferences and duty requirements as possible while ensuring optimum usage of available resources. We propose mathematical programming models that represent different variants of this problem. The models were tested on a real case from the Surgery Department of a local government hospital, as well as on randomly generated problem instances. The computational results are reported together with analysis on the optimal solutions obtained. For large-scale instances that could not be solved by the exact method, we propose a heuristic algorithm to generate good solutions. © 2013 Operational Research Society Ltd. All rights reserved.