An integrated task and personnel scheduling problem to optimize distributed services in hospitals

This paper addresses a real-life task and personnel scheduling problem arising in a large Italian company that needs to provide cleaning services inside a hospital. In this case study, the challenge is to determine a schedule of the employees to clean the whole hospital aiming to minimize the total labor cost, taking into account the fact that the building is a complex structure with multiple levels and each room has different peculiarity. To solve the problem, we propose a three-step approach using mathematical models and metaheuristic algorithms. The solution obtained indicates that the schedule attained by our method is better than the one generated by the company. In addition, to test and validate our approach more thoroughly, a set of artificial instances have been created. The results indicate that our method can help organizations to quickly generate and test a large variety of solutions. Our findings can be of general interest for other personnel scheduling problems involving distributed services.