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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. The discussion provides ample evidence that the subject is notable. Problems with the article (as well as the suggested merge) can be dealt with through the editorial process. -- Ed ( Edgar181) 12:59, 21 March 2014 (UTC) reply

Nurse scheduling problem

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Written like an essay. No references. There is nothing special about nurse scheduling that does not apply to scheduling constraints for any field. jsfouche ☽☾ Talk 21:58, 10 March 2014 (UTC) reply

  • Delete - If there are staffing issues related to nursing (which...as a nurse, short-staffing can be a serious problem in the industry), but those issues should be noted on the general page for the career. This is an essay. Bali88 ( talk) 22:12, 10 March 2014 (UTC) reply
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Medicine-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k ( talk) 02:32, 11 March 2014 (UTC) reply
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k ( talk) 02:32, 11 March 2014 (UTC) reply
  • Keep or merge somewhere. There is a substantial literature on this specific operations research problem (over 1,000 Google Scholar hits). It might be better discussed in a broader context, though I see no ideal merge target. A WP:TROUT to the nominator for not doing a WP:BEFORE check. -- 101.119.14.210 ( talk) 07:49, 11 March 2014 (UTC) reply
  • Move to " Nurse scheduling". Of the four external links provided, only one ( Goodman) is clearly relevant. One link is to an archived format and the other two are not found. There are papers that describe the nurse scheduling problem ( Weil and Okada). However the more generic title, "Nurse scheduling", provides other suitable references ( Sitompul and Yen). The article requires clean-up and in-line citations. Axl ¤ [Talk] 14:24, 11 March 2014 (UTC) reply
  • Merge to Schedule (workplace). I don't think there are major differences between nurse scheduling and other jobs (air traffic controller, grocery worker, police, ...). Admittedly the target I suggested is not well developed so it could be improved by the merge. Dingo1729 ( talk) 21:36, 13 March 2014 (UTC) reply
This is a computer science problem. As Obi-Wan Kenobi commented, merging this article with Schedule (workplace) would be analogous to merging Traveling salesman problem with Travel because lots of people travel, not just salesmen. That may be true, but it misses the point. The topic is about how to get a computer to provide optimal solutions to a complex non-polynomial problem, and the use of 'salesman' or 'nurse' is mostly just a convention to give the topic a name which is easy to express and understand. - NorsemanII ( talk) 23:53, 19 March 2014 (UTC) reply
@ NorsemanII I don't think I'm very far from your position. My only concern is that the name Nurse scheduling problem may make people (for example Bearian) believe that this is specifically about Nursing. This is confused by the fact that a significant part of the literature is indeed about the practical problem of scheduling nurses (in contrast to the travelling salesman problem which is never about travelling salesmen). So I'm not strongly opposed to the title, but I'd prefer something more generic if possible. Dingo1729 ( talk) 04:24, 20 March 2014 (UTC) reply
@ Dingo1729: You make a good point that it seems like most of the articles about the nurse scheduling problem do not talk much about applicability of the solution techniques to other fields, even though it is widely applicable to other fields. I agree the name is a little bit misleading, though I'm not entirely sure how to deal with it. The NSP is essentially applicable to all employee scheduling problems, and vice versa. If you can handle 24/7 nurse staffing for a hospital, you can handle 24/7 operator staffing for a call center, or driver staffing for a 24/7 taxi service, or cash register staffing for a 24/7 grocery store. However, scientific literature seems to place heavy emphasis on nurse scheduling. For example, the literature review in Resident Scheduling Problem devotes about 1½ pages to generic manpower scheduling research, half a page to telephone operator scheduling research, 2 pages to mass-transit bus/airplane crew scheduling research, and then 4½ pages to NSP research. I suppose we could jumble all of these separate fields of the same problem into a single article, or make them separate pages and link to them from a single article. However, finding an appropriate title is tricky. Here are some possibilities:
I'm not thrilled about that top result since it seems fairly vague. What differences would you expect to see between "manpower scheduling" and schedule (workplace)? I would not guess that "manpower scheduling" would be the name Wikipedia picked for a computer science article. The gender-specific wording is also less than ideal. The second result, "Shift scheduling problem", does seem more like a computer science subject, but it gets fewer results than either of "nurse scheduling problem" or "nurse rostering problem". Still, that's probably the best bet for a top category for this field of research.
The interesting part here is that the combination of those results (2187 total, including the nursing results) is still cited less than the combination of "nurse scheduling problem", "nurse rostering problem" and the nursing citations found in the results above (2460 results, total). Unfortunately, since the articles about the nurse scheduling problem focus so much on nurses, this isn't quite as black-and-white as the traveling salesman problem.
Suggestion: Suppose we keep/merge nurse scheduling problem, make shift scheduling problem, and then link it to nurse scheduling problem? - NorsemanII ( talk) 20:29, 20 March 2014 (UTC) reply
Addendum: @ Dingo1729: If we'd rather leave NSP the top category for this subject for a while, here's a few comments from research papers describing the general applicability of solutions to the NSP:
  • "In this paper, we proposed an efficient method for NSP using SA. In this method, a cost matrix is used for transition rule. This approach generated a nurse schedule faster in time and better in quality than traditional SA. Although we have presented this work in terms of nurse scheduling, it should be noticed that the main idea of the approach could be applied to many other scheduling problems." - An Improvement Technique for Simulated Annealing and Its Application to Nurse Scheduling Problem
  • "The quality of the final results, together with the fact that the indirect GA approach proved to be more flexible and robust than Tabu Search, makes the indirect GA a good choice to solve the nurse-scheduling problem. Its central idea of changing the problem into a permutation problem and then building solutions with a separate decoder can be applied to all constrained scheduling problems. Thus given this success, experiments with similar approaches on other difficult problems, in scheduling and other application areas is an interesting area for further research." - An Indirect Genetic Algorithm for a Nurse Scheduling Problem
  • "In this paper a method for combining case-based reasoning with a meta-heuristic algorithm has been introduced. ... The repairs in the case-base avoid violating nurse shift preferences wherever possible and so guide the search towards feasible solutions with high nurse satisfaction. ... The incorporation of the case-based repair generation methodology into other constraint satisfaction techniques will also be considered." - A novel approach to finding feasible solutions to personnel rostering problems
The only exception I saw to general application of NSP to the field of employee scheduling, rather than the other way around, was this: "The Nurse Rostering Problem is a subclass of the personnel scheduling problems..." - [ Solving the Nurse Rostering Problem]. Other than that, articles I saw either talked about the applicability of the NSP/NRP to nursing, or to other fields, rather than talking about how employee scheduling in other fields could be applied to nursing or elsewhere. I didn't count how many articles I read in total, but I think it was in the ballpark of 15-30.
To draw an analogy, suppose the TSP had been called the Package Delivery Problem. We usually ignore salesmen in TSP because they don't really offer a compelling reason to do significant amounts of research, so we focus on the TSP because of other things, like package delivery. If it were called the Package Delivery Problem, we would see a great deal of research focusing on how the Package Delivery Problem could be used to deliver packages efficiently, because that would actually maintain fairly significant economic interest. We might then see only a handful of articles about how the Package Delivery Problem could be applied to other things, because usually talking about application to package delivery would be enough. In a similar manner, I think that's what we're seeing with the NSP. Since nursing schedules are of significant economic interest already, there isn't as much need to talk about applicability to other fields, even though it does have wide applicability, as shown in those three quotes above. - NorsemanII ( talk) 22:50, 20 March 2014 (UTC) reply
I'm coming around to your view. I wasn't aware originally how much Employee scheduling is dominated by Nurse scheduling in the literature. Yes, there should probably be a short article about the more general problem. I'd suggest Employee scheduling problem, but your suggestion of Shift scheduling problem would be OK too. Dingo1729 ( talk) 03:52, 21 March 2014 (UTC) reply
I'm sure that Pakistani hospitals also have to schedule their nurses, but Nursing in pakistan doesn't mention that and has absolutely no similarity or connections with this article. Dingo1729 ( talk) 04:19, 18 March 2014 (UTC) reply
Both articles started out as crap, and both concerned nursing, which is a marginalized field in academia and the subject of systemic bias here. Bearian ( talk) 19:55, 19 March 2014 (UTC) reply
@ Dingo1729 now I get what you're saying: this is a generic problem, which is named for something, but not about it. I am not against merging this instead, to an appropriate target. Bearian ( talk) 13:12, 20 March 2014 (UTC) reply
OK, thanks Dingo1729 ( talk) 14:15, 20 March 2014 (UTC) reply
  • obvious keep Have you guys even bothered to check google scholar? I count thousands of hits for this class of problem. This is a computer science article ultimately, not one about nurses. It it like the Traveling salesman problem. For whatever reason, this particular class of problems is focused on nurses, but arguments that other fields have scheduling issues is MISSING THE POINT (it's like saying "Well, other jobs need to travel for work, so we shouldn't have Traveling salesman problem). Bearian, I must disagree strongly though that this has much of anything at all to do with systemic bias (or nursing for that matter), and you will likely find the vast majority of sources that discuss this couldn't give a sh*t about nurses, they are simply computer scientists trying to find an optimized solution to a technical problem. Nurses is a RED HERRING here folks. Ultimately, the solutions to these scheduling problems may be installed into software and put into hospitals, but my guess is most academics just like studying it because it's an interesting problem.-- Obi-Wan Kenobi ( talk) 20:14, 19 March 2014 (UTC) reply
Is this an article where much more could be written to expand on the subject? Or is this about it? My first thought is that I could summarize this whole article, as it currently exists, into a couple of short paragraphs and include it in a section on the nursing article and I believe it would get more views there (I know "number of views" isn't necessarily a criterion for article inclusion, but I think it would be more visible there). Bali88 ( talk) 00:59, 21 March 2014 (UTC) reply
I'm of the opinion that much more can be written about it. If you want to put a mention in the Nursing article that would be OK. But it might be more appropriate to mention it in Hospital management. It's sort of peripheral to Nursing. Dingo1729 ( talk) 03:52, 21 March 2014 (UTC) reply
  • Reason to SNOW close this - see the intro to this paper, which states the following: "One intricate computational problem still researched today is the Nurse Rostering Problem (NRP). The problem can be defined as finding an (near) optimal allocation of nurses to shifts in a hospital. Quality is measured by the number (and severity) of preference and coverage violations, represented by penalties. Studied for over more than 40 years, the NRP has an extensive literature. Due to its highly constrained nature and large search space, solving a NRP is far from easy." (bolding mine). Come on, do we really need more than that? Extensive literature.... I agree with a TROUT to the nom.-- Obi-Wan Kenobi ( talk) 20:26, 19 March 2014 (UTC) reply
  • Keep and merge with nurse rostering problem I'm the author of the nurse rostering problem page. I created that page since I couldn't find the topic on Wikipedia and wasn't aware that the topic went by another name. I've checked Google Scholar to see which of the two terms is more commonly used, and "nurse scheduling problem" gets 1,090 results, while "nurse rostering problem" gets 764 results (Note: The searches were done in quotes, so the searches are considering scholarly articles which literally have those three words in that order).
Based on those search results, there is absolutely enough scholarly research for Wikipedia to host the topic. My version also has cited scholarly references at the very least, so the minimum standards for inclusion on Wikipedia have already been met on that version, even if nurse scheduling problem has citation issues. Since it appears that "nurse scheduling problem" is the more common phrasing, it seems that "nurse scheduling problem" should be the title that Wikipedia uses for the topic, and "Nurse Rostering Problem" should become a redirect. In terms of keeping everything referenced, most of the text on nurse scheduling problem is redundant, and the text which isn't redundant is uncited. It may be less work to just merge the working external links from nurse scheduling problem into nurse rostering problem, and then move nurse rostering problem to nurse scheduling problem. - NorsemanII ( talk) 23:53, 19 March 2014 (UTC) reply
@ NorsemanII:, since you seem to know this space, would you mind just doing the merge per WP:BOLD, I don't think we need to wait. That would instantly strengthen this article that is up for deletion.-- Obi-Wan Kenobi ( talk) 15:29, 20 March 2014 (UTC) reply
@ Obiwankenobi: I've finished moving the non-redundant content from nurse scheduling problem to nurse rostering problem, and also improved the page a little bit. I am unable to directly complete the move myself, so I think we'll need an administrator for that. - NorsemanII ( talk) 20:29, 20 March 2014 (UTC) reply
Ok, thanks looks much better. I agree with your earlier findings, that this should live at Nurse scheduling problem, but the article at Nurse rostering problem should be moved there. Once this closes I can make it so with help from an admin.-- Obi-Wan Kenobi ( talk) 02:36, 21 March 2014 (UTC) reply
Keep and merge. This is a model problem in operations research and computer science, similar in spirit to the traveling salesman problem and the bin packing problem. As Obi-Wan Kenobi noted, this has been around for decades. This paper is a bibliographic survey showing the extensive research done on the problem. The topic is highly notable. The article itself has problems with lack of references and I agree with the others that a merge with the nurse rostering problem will create a stronger single article. But these are surmountable problems and, per WP:SURMOUNTABLE, such articles should be improved, not deleted. A highly notable topic and surmountable article problems suggests keeping the article. -- Mark viking ( talk) 12:45, 20 March 2014 (UTC) reply
  • Keep or Merge with dupe article dedicated to the topic, Nurse rostering problem. The AfD appears to have been requested under the misapprehension that this has anything to do with nurses. They are purely an example used to illustrate a complex and important reasoning problem, which has had many practical applications, and has been the topic of a great deal of major research. Leondz ( talk) 15:07, 20 March 2014 (UTC) reply
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
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