An Improvement Technique for Simulated Annealing and Its Appli- cation to Nurse Scheduling Problem

The simulated annealing was perceived as a useful method for many intractable problems. However, it needs additional strategies to cope with time complexity due to an initial state and search space reduction. In this work, we suggested an efficient transition rule and applied it to a nurse scheduling problem. It uses a cost matrix to reduce a set of candidates, which results in performance improvement. The experimental results showed that the suggested method generated a feasible solution for the nurse scheduling problem faster in time and better in quality compared to traditional simulated annealing.