Strategic and Tactical Scheduling of Logistics Assistants Leveraging Flexibility in Shifts and Tasks Using Column Generation: An Opportunity for Hospital Logistics
- The thesis addresses the introduction of a new type of employee in hospitals, referred to as logistics assistant to take over tasks unrelated to patient care and relieve medical staff of activities outside their core business. First, we provide a comprehensive literature review on hospital material logistics. Then, we present integrated shift and task scheduling problems that may arise in the course of the introduction of the new employee type. Shift scheduling typically comprises an iterative process that starts with demand modeling based on predefined task schedules or staffing level requirements that are initially derived from the patient mix and their needs in terms of care. Often, demand is determined based on historical data and fixed inputs. In the work at hand, we integrate shift and task scheduling into one holistic model. We derive the resource supply in the shift scheduling part of our work and define the resource demand in the task scheduling part. In both areas, we assumeThe thesis addresses the introduction of a new type of employee in hospitals, referred to as logistics assistant to take over tasks unrelated to patient care and relieve medical staff of activities outside their core business. First, we provide a comprehensive literature review on hospital material logistics. Then, we present integrated shift and task scheduling problems that may arise in the course of the introduction of the new employee type. Shift scheduling typically comprises an iterative process that starts with demand modeling based on predefined task schedules or staffing level requirements that are initially derived from the patient mix and their needs in terms of care. Often, demand is determined based on historical data and fixed inputs. In the work at hand, we integrate shift and task scheduling into one holistic model. We derive the resource supply in the shift scheduling part of our work and define the resource demand in the task scheduling part. In both areas, we assume a high degree of flexibility. On the resource supply side, we incorporate flexibility in the employees' shift schedules. Unlike traditional shift scheduling approaches, there are no explicit shift patterns to be scheduled. Instead, we rely on highly flexible implicit shift scheduling. On the demand side, we schedule tasks in order to minimize peaks and create demand patterns that fit well with the available resources. The work at hand addresses two optimization problems that occur in the course of the introduction of logistics assistants, namely the strategic workforce sizing problem and the tactical shift and task scheduling problem. For both optimization problems, we present optimal solution procedures, i.e., a column generation algorithm and a branch-and-price approach. Throughout this work, we aim to leverage the flexibility incorporated in both shift scheduling and task scheduling to find optimal solutions.…

