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Scheduling Medical Residents at Boston University School of Medicine

Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109
Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas 72703
Department of Psychiatry, St. Luke's Hospital, New York, New York 10025
Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts 02118
Montefiore Medical Center, Bronx, New York 10467
amycohn{at}umich.edu
seroot{at}uark.edu
ckymissis{at}yahoo.com
justin.esses{at}bmc.org
nwestmor{at}montefiore.org

The chief residents in the psychiatry program at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) must construct a schedule that simultaneously assigns residents to five types of call shifts, spanning three different hospitals, over a 365-day planning horizon. We show how user expertise and heuristic approaches alone fail to find acceptable solutions to this complex combinatorial problem; likewise, mathematical programming techniques alone are inadequate, largely because they lack a clearly definable objective function. However, by combining both approaches, we were able to find high-quality solutions in a very short time. The resulting schedule, which BUSM uses currently, has yielded substantial benefits; the solution quality has improved, and the effort required to develop the solution has been reduced.

Key Words: philosophy of modeling; health care; hospitals; integer programming applications; multiple criteria