The task of scheduling medical staff for evening rounds in the Clinical Teaching Unit of the Ottawa Hospital is a long complicated task due to its complexity. Three main classifications of staff, combined with various rotations, skill sets, clinical teams and vacation periods have combined to create a difficult scheduling problem. As there were no commercial packages available to solve this particular task, a study was made of heuristic scheduling and optimization techniques and a program based on a variation of the tabu search heuristic was written and tested. This system is being used to schedule medical staff at the Ottawa Hospital.
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