Nurse Scheduling System

A flexible web application designed to streamline and automate nurse scheduling, suitable for a wide range of diverse and complex real-world requirements.

• Stable version (frontend-only) hosted on Netlify.
• Development version hosted on Netlify.
• Documentation hosted on Netlify.
• Source code hosted on GitHub.

Introduction

The nurse scheduling (or employee scheduling) problem is a well-known problem in the field of operations research (OR) and can be (approximately) solved efficiently by constrained optimization.

However, constraints can differ greatly between hospitals and wards, and there is currently no unified framework for modeling these diverse requirements. Most existing literature focuses on modeling an over-simplified constraint set, which is not applicable to real-world situations. Therefore, in practice, the problem is still often solved by hand with the help of Excel, which is often extremely time-consuming. The entire process requires several hours or even more than ten hours, depending on the problem complexity (e.g., co-scheduling of multiple understaffed wards).

This project (Nurse Scheduling System, or 護理排班系統 in Mandarin) aims to develop a flexible web app to automate the nurse scheduling task, and to provide a unified framework for modeling all types of real-world scenarios without sacrificing flexibility.

This project is in active development. Breaking changes may occur without notice. Please proceed with caution. Although the current version has been verified by domain experts and used successfully (with minimal post-adjustment) in several complex multi-ward scenarios involving up to ~100 nurses, it currently has a steep learning curve and lacks proper documentation.

How to run

Prerequisites

• Node.js, nvm, and npm.
• uv

These are not hard requirements. If you know what you are doing, you can also use other tools to manage dependencies, such as virtualenv or conda.

Web Frontend

cd web-frontend
npm install
npm run dev

For building static site, run:

cd web-frontend
npm run build

For linting, run:

cd web-frontend
npm run lint -- --fix

Core

cd core
# create virtual environment
uv venv --python 3.12
# activate virtual environment
source .venv/bin/activate
# install dependencies
uv pip install -r requirements.txt
# run CLI
python -m nurse_scheduling.cli <input_file_path> [output_csv_path]
# run CLI with prettify and verbose
python -m nurse_scheduling.cli <input_file_path> [output_xlsx_path] --verbose --prettify
# run all tests
pytest --log-cli-level=INFO
# Note that setting `WRITE_TO_CSV=True` in `core/tests/test_all.py` is often useful for creating new test cases

Note: The tests and code coverage are only for the core module. The web frontend is not covered by tests.

Documentation

cd docs
# create virtual environment
uv venv --python 3.12
# activate virtual environment
source .venv/bin/activate
# install dependencies
uv pip install -r requirements.txt
# preview documentation
mkdocs serve

For building static site, run:

cd docs
mkdocs build

Acknowledgments

This project would not have been possible without the contributions of @ijsun and Jennifer Tzeng.

You can find the full list of code contributors here.

License

This project is licensed under the AGPL-3.0 License.

References

• Nurse rostering - Timefold
• A nurse scheduling problem - OR-Tools
• Haspeslagh et al., 2010, First International Nurse Rostering Competition 2010 [website]
• Ceschia et al., 2015, Second International Nurse Rostering Competition (INRC-II) --- Problem Description and Rules --- [website]