id: 05269128
dt: j
an: 05269128
au: Ikegami, Atsuko; Uno, Aki
ti: Bounds for staff size in home help staff scheduling.
so: J. Oper. Res. Soc. Japan 50, No. 4, 563-575 (2007).
py: 2007
pu: The Operations Research Society of Japan, Tokyo
la: EN
cc: 
ut: health care; staff scheduling; mathematical modeling; transportation;
    network flow
ci: 
li: 
ab: Summary: Home help organizations provide services at respective users’
    homes at a time that is convenient for the user. Helpers with time
    window constraints for their working hours must be assigned to these
    services to ensure that the services are provided. Producing adequate
    schedules usually takes the schedulers a considerable amount of time
    due to many types of constraints and requirements. It is difficult even
    to estimate the number of helpers needed. In this paper, we introduce a
    mathematical programming formulation of the home help staff scheduling
    problem, and propose two types of lower bounds for the number of
    helpers needed on a specific day. We then also calculate the number of
    helpers using a simple heuristic algorithm in order to determine the
    upper bound. Combining the bounds with the information obtained when
    determining the bounds was shown to be useful for arranging the
    appropriate helpers for each day before making a detailed schedule,
    even though each of the algorithms that obtains the bounds is very
    simple.
rv: