At the beginning of each shift, the head nurse groups the infants for assignment to staff nurses. This assignment is one to one so that each nurse cares for one group of infants throughout the shift. The large variation in infant conditions complicates this process and makes it difficult to develop balanced nurse work loads. Disproportionate work loads create tension between nurses that affect the quality of care that infants receive. To complicate the problem, critical care nurseries often have a number of zones.
Zones can correspond to staging areas or areas separated by aisles or even floors.
Because nurses need to remain physically close to infants in their care, it is not desirable to assign nurses across zones. Further, every shift must maintain at least one admit nurse, the nurse who cares for infants arriving to the nursery during the shift. Because the head nurse generates a new assignment at the beginning of every shift, she has less than 30 minutes to perform this complicated task. We are also investigating the effect of problem parameters, such as the number of zones and the maximum number of infants assigned to a nurse, on the performance of these heuristics. Lawley, M. A Control Model for Integrating Routing Flexibility and Algebraic Deadlock Avoidance Policies in Automated Manufacturing Systems International Journal of Production Research.