A Decomposition, Construction and Post-Processing Approach for Nurse Rostering

Peter Brucker, Rong Qu, Edmund Burke, Gerhard Post

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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 languageEnglish
Title of host publicationMISTA 2005
Subtitle of host publicationProceedings of the 2nd Multidisciplinary Conference on Scheduling: Theory and Applications
EditorsGraham Kendall, Lei Lei, Michael Pinedo
Place of PublicationNew York, NY
PublisherUniversity of New York
Pages397-406
Number of pages9
Publication statusPublished - 2005
Event2nd Multidisciplinary International Conference on Scheduling: Theory & Applications, MISTA 2005 - New York, United States
Duration: 18 Jul 200521 Jul 2005
Conference number: 2

Conference

Conference2nd Multidisciplinary International Conference on Scheduling: Theory & Applications, MISTA 2005
Abbreviated titleMISTA
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityNew York
Period18/07/0521/07/05

Keywords

  • Nurse rostering problems
  • Decomposition
  • Variable neighborhood search

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