ABC Hospital Staff Allocation - Essay Example

This research will begin with the statement that at the start of every new year, hospital owners face a difficult challenge. This is the construction of a feasible timetable that satisfies patient and institutional needs. The difficulty of this challenge is to consider patient needs and satisfy them as much as possible. During the registration period, patients complete a registration form which includes any specific requirements or needs to be considere. Once the registration phase is completed, the hospital owner needs to separate patients with needs from the rest of the group and prioritize them during the hospital scheduling phase.

The timetabling of the hospital can take a lot of time to construct considering the amount of patients enrolled. The owner’s aim is to satisfy the patient’s needs as much as possible. The resulting timetable, which was created manually with a piece of paper and a pen, may not satisfy all constraints as much as it could. More research was done in order to find the most appropriate software and programming language that can handle constraints accordingly. Gathering knowledge from books on the subject and websites through internet searching helped gain an understanding of the constraint logic programming principles and methodologies.

In order to get familiar with the software and the programming language the researched was mainly focused on its programming principles and capabilities. Constraint Logic Programming is based upon integrating Constraint Solving and Logic Programming. Combination of the two types of programming makes it both expressive and flexible and in some cases more efficient than other programming languages. After having attained knowledge and understanding of this type of programming, a program was constructed to satisfy the needs of the patients in order to create a hospital schedule for the hospital.

Different approaches were tried in order to develop such an application and findings and results of this development are shown in the next pages. Appendix B contains the rest of the elements necessary to the