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

Brucker, Peter; Qu, Rong; Burke, Edmund; Post, Gerhard

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.

Citation

Brucker, P., Qu, R., Burke, E., & Post, G. (2005). A Decomposition, Construction and Post-Processing Approach for Nurse Rostering.

• Conference Name: Multidisciplinary International Conference on Scheduling : Theory and Applications
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2005
• Deposit Date: Dec 12, 2005
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 9, 2007
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Keywords: nurse rostering problems, decomposition, variable neighborhood search
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1020162