Case Article—Pediatrician Scheduling at British Columbia Women’s Hospital

This article describes an in-class role-playing exercise, as well as a case study, on the application of mixed integer programming to help a hospital with physician scheduling. The intended audiences are graduate students or advanced undergraduate students taking a first course in optimization who have been introduced to integer programming. The role-playing exercise aims to develop students’ skills in the iterative process of listening to decision makers describe their problem, asking them questions, and developing initial formulations of the problem. The case study provides students the opportunity to spend more time developing a full mathematical formulation, solving it, and writing up their findings. The case assumes students have already been introduced to the “Big-M” method but assumes no prior introduction to the concepts of hard versus soft constraints. There is no natural objective in this problem, such as the usual “maximize profit” or “minimize cost”; instead, students are introduced to the topic of Goal Programming, which also introduces them to the concept of multiobjective optimization.