A Variable Neighbourhood Search for nurse scheduling with balanced preference satisfaction

Constantino, Ademir Aparecido; Tozzo, Everton; Pinheiro, Rodrigo Lankaites; Landa-Silva, Dario; Rom�o, Wesley

Abstract

The nurse scheduling problem (NSP) is a combinatorial optimisation problem widely tackled in the literature. Recently, a new variant of this problem was proposed, called nurse scheduling problem with balanced preference satisfaction (NSPBPS). This paper further investigates this variant of the NSP as we propose a new algorithm to solve the problem and obtain a better balance of overall preference satisfaction. Initiall, the algorithm converts the problem to a bottleneck assignment problem and solves it to generate an initial feasible solution for the NSPBPS. Posteriorly, the algorithm applies the Variable Neighbourhood Search (VNS) metaheuristic using two sets of search neighbourhoods in order to improve the initial solution. We empirically assess the performance of the algorithm using the NSPLib benchmark instances and we compare our results to other results found in the literature. The proposed VNS algorithm exhibits good performance by achieving solutions that are fairer (in terms of preference satisfaction) for the majority of the scenarios.

• Conference Name: 17th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2015)
• End Date: Apr 30, 2015
• Publication Date: Dec 1, 2015
• Deposit Date: Jan 21, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 21, 2016
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Keywords: Nurse Scheduling, Variable Neighbourhood Search
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/980768
• Publisher URL: http://www.scitepress.org/DigitalLibrary/Link.aspx?doi=10.5220/0005364404620470
• Additional Information: Published in: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems: Barcelona, Spain 27-30 April, 2015. [Setúbal, Portugal] : Scitepress, 2015, ISBN: 978-989-758-096-3. pp. 462-470, doi: 10.5220/0005364404620470