Collaboration for good: Aviation operational tech solves Covid nurse scheduling problem

The arrival of COVID has turned everything. This has created an immediate need to rapidly expand intensive care units and challenging existing employment practices and regulation. Out of this crisis inspirational and clever collaborations around the world delivered a myriad of life-saving solutions. The use of Boeing’s market leading Jeppesen digital aviation software, which uses FICO® Xpress Optimization, to solve a crucial nurse scheduling problem at the intensive care unit (ICU) of Karolinska University Hospital is one of the best examples.

The virus was spreading throughout Sweden, and Stockholm’s Karolinska University Hospital needed to scale up its operation significantly to cope with the rapidly increasing patients. The staff were working by risking their health and life. A larger workforce was established by adding people from various other care units and a Swedish Crisis Agreement. Karolinska needed to create a plan to ensure that this much larger workforce, with a new work agreement, would operate safely and effectively. And the plan needed to be in place to produce schedules for the ICU’s nurses and assistant nurses.

The solution came from an unexpected source. The hospital approached Boeing ‘s crew solution team in Gothenburg, to help them solve this urgent problem. Daniel Roth, Senior Business Advisor with Boeing said that the biggest challenge, so far, was time. They only had a week to produce the initial schedule. The data was not available in a structured way, but rather in the heads of current schedulers and management.

It is extensively used aviation solution with FICO Xpress Optimization as an integral part. The resultant structure was based on two types of 12.5 hour overlapping shifts, meaning 56 per week. Seven different competence profiles were established, with minimum requirements per shift and an objective to maximize coverage. And, using Boeing’s Jeppesen Crew Rostering, enabled the creation of rosters for over 300 nurses and healthcare workers during the peak period. And this resulted in more workable shifts for staff and better coverage for the hospital.

Tomas Gustafsson, Portfolio Manager with Boeing explained how the team tackled this. The Jeppesen solution approach combines heuristics and exact methods to reach those practical run times, where the sub-problem linear and integer programs are solved using FICO Xpress. Once a first solution was produced, a joint Karolinska-Boeing solution team intensively refined the schedule over of a few days and nights. This included determining what work patterns were possible, changing the problem slightly, re-running and producing a new solution. None of this would have been possible without the speed, flexibility and robustness of the underlying optimization algorithm, of which FICO Xpress is an essential part, he said.

For its achievements, Boeing’s crew solution team won the 2021 FICO® Decisions Award for AI, Machine Learning & Optimization. The judges were impressed how quickly Boeing’s team understood the problem, addressed it, and implemented a solution. These data scientists did an excellent job of rising to the occasion.