The Effect of Parameters on the Success of Heuristic Algorithms in Personalized Personnel Scheduling

Work-life balance is an approach that aims to enable employees to balance their work, family, and private lives. It is seen that the factors in the work-life balance are not relevant to work and family, considering the activities that one wishes for oneself, friendships and social life. For this reason, it has become mandatory for working people to devote enough time to their business life, family life and private life to protect their physical and mental health. This is particularly important in health-care sector, where the peace of mind of workers influences the outcoming service significantly. Within the scope of this study, a framework (also implemented as a software) for health-care workers has been developed in order to make weekly and monthly scheduling suitable for work-life balance. Three population-based heuristic algorithms for scheduling, namely genetic algorithm, ant colony and particle swarm optimization algorithms, are integrated into the system to optimize the schedules. The system aims to show optimal schedules for both which personnel is to work in which time zones of the hospital administrators and in which time zones the individual personnel is planned to work. The proposed approach allows doctors, as the most flexible workers, to opt the working hours and periods in a hospital flexibly. This study provides comparative results to demonstrate the performance of the three algorithms integrated to optimize the generated personal schedules optimized with respect to one's own preferences. Furthermore, it identifies the boundaries of the parameters affecting the success with Taguchi Method.