Abstract
This paper presents our work on decomposing a specific nurse rostering problem by cyclically assigning blocks of shifts, which are designed considering both hard and soft constraints, to groups of nurses. The rest of the shifts are then assigned to the nurses to construct a schedule based on the one cyclically generated by blocks. The schedules obtained by decomposition and construction can be further improved by a variable neighborhood search. Significant results are obtained and compared with a genetic algorithm and a variable neighborhood search approach on a problem that was presented to us by our collaborator, ORTEC bv, The Netherlands. We believe that the approach has the potential to be further extended to solve a wider range of nurse rostering problems.
| Original language | English |
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| Title of host publication | MISTA 2005 |
| Subtitle of host publication | Proceedings of the 2nd Multidisciplinary Conference on Scheduling: Theory and Applications |
| Editors | Graham Kendall, Lei Lei, Michael Pinedo |
| Place of Publication | New York, NY |
| Publisher | University of New York |
| Pages | 397-406 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| Publication status | Published - 2005 |
| Event | 2nd Multidisciplinary International Conference on Scheduling: Theory & Applications, MISTA 2005 - New York, United States Duration: 18 Jul 2005 → 21 Jul 2005 Conference number: 2 |
Conference
| Conference | 2nd Multidisciplinary International Conference on Scheduling: Theory & Applications, MISTA 2005 |
|---|---|
| Abbreviated title | MISTA |
| Country/Territory | United States |
| City | New York |
| Period | 18/07/05 → 21/07/05 |
Keywords
- Nurse rostering problems
- Decomposition
- Variable neighborhood search