Constraint programming based techniques for medical resources optimization: medical internships planning

Hospital internships are the most essential and important component of any medical training to acquire and develop different clinical skills. The main management issue related to this point is the allocation of internship students to different services undergoing several logistical and pedagogical constraints during the hospital university calendar. In this paper, we show how we can use Constraint Programming design to model and solve this problem through the Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSP). Then, we propose an extended model (Constraint Optimization model) to cover the limitations of the CSP model and find the optimal scheduling taking in account students’ preferences. Finally, we show that using several What-If scenarios can help to suggest and recommend to decision makers some adjustments to the problem inner rules to get the optimal solution.