Workload Balancing Among Heathcare Workers Under Uncertain Service Time Using Distributionally Robust Optimization

Abstract

Healthcare systems are facing serious challenges in balancing their human resources to cope with volatile service demand, while at the same time providing necessary job satisfaction to the healthcare workers. In this paper, we propose a distributionally robust optimization formulation to generate a task assignment plan that promotes the fairness in allocation, attained by reducing the difference in the total working time among workers, under uncertain service time. The proposed joint chance constraint model is conservatively approximated by a worst-case Conditional Value-at-Risk, and we devise a sequential algorithm to solve the finite-dimensional reformulations which are linear (mixed-binary) optimization problems. We also provide explicit formula in the situation where the support set of the random vectors is a hyperrectangle. The experiment with both synthetic and real data indicates promising results for our distributionally robust optimization approach.