Modeling shift workers' scheduling desires: an application involving nursing personnel

We are developing a computerized scheduling program that considers the schedule preferences of individual nurses. We want schedules that satisfy the staffing requirements of the unit and the work preferences of the nurses, while being fair. To reach this goal, we must calculate the desirability of every possible schedule for every nurse. The calculated preference scores of the schedules will be used by the computer to assign individual schedules and to keep a running tally of how well nurses' desires have been met. We present here the first model of nurses' scheduling desires. We modeled the schedule preferences as the desire to work the assigned shifts, plus the pattern of day-off, plus the pattern of tour splitting. Using this model, we account for an average of 81% of the variance.