HIBISCUS: A Constraint Programming Application to Staff Scheduling in Health Care

This paper presents a constraint programming model and search strategy to formulate and solve staff scheduling problems in health care. This is a well-studied problem for which many different approaches have been developed over the years but it remains a challenge to successfully apply any given instance of a method to the various contexts encountered. We show how the main categories of rules involved may be expressed using global constraints. We describe a modular architecture for heuristic search. The resulting flexible and rather general constraint programming approach is evaluated on benchmark problems from different hospitals and for different types of personnel.