ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Nurse scheduling problem

Okay kiddo, have you ever been to a hospital or a clinic and seen nurses taking care of the sick people there? It's their job to take care of patients and make sure they are feeling better.

Now, imagine that there are many nurses working in a hospital and they all have different schedules. Some might work during the day, some might work at night, and some might work on weekends.

But the problem is that the number of patients who need care can change every day. Some days, there might be more patients to take care of, and on other days there might be fewer. So, the hospital needs to make sure that there are enough nurses available to take care of all the patients, no matter how many there are.

This is where the nurse scheduling problem comes in. The hospital needs to figure out how to schedule the nurses so that there are enough nurses working during each shift, and that no nurse is overworked or working too many hours in a row.

To do this, the hospital uses computer programs that take into account the number of patients, the skills of the nurses, and the availability of the nurses. The programs create schedules that make sure there are enough nurses working during each shift, and that each nurse gets the right amount of rest between shifts.

So, the nurse scheduling problem is really just a way for hospitals to make sure that they have enough nurses available to take care of all the sick people who need their help, while also making sure that the nurses are well-rested and not overworked.
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