A 2-Stage Approach for the Nurse Rostering Problem

In this paper, we are addressing the NP-hard nurse rostering problem utilizing a 2-stage approach. stage one, Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and Hill Climbing (HC) hybridized in finding feasible solution (satisfying all hard constraints). We propose new constant C value (which balances search diversification intensification of MCTS) tree policy/node selection function procedure MCTS. two, is further improved using Iterated Local (ILS) with Variable Neighbourhood Descent as local component. introduce several unique neighbourhood structures for ILS. addition, novel perturbation strategy to allow escape from optimum. The proposed methodology tested on Shift Scheduling dataset (24 benchmark instances). New best results reported seven two instances 10 60 minutes run respectively. An in-depth discussion attributes that lead its good performance provided.