A mathematical model for nurse scheduling with different preference ranks

On nurse shift schedules, it is common that the nursing staff have diverse preferences about shift rotations and days off. We propose a nurse scheduling model based upon integer programming under the constraints of the schedule, different preference ranks towards each shift and the historical data of previous schedule periods so that the nursing staff’s preference satisfaction about the shift schedule is maximized. The main difference of the proposed model from the previous works is to consider that the nursing staff’s satisfaction level is affected by preference ranks and their priority ordering to be scheduled, so that the quality of shift schedule is more reasonable.