Investigation of fairness measures for nurse rostering

The nurse rostering problem presents a combinatorial optimisation problem in which shifts must be assigned to nurses who are subject to a large number of workforce related constraints. In the literature on nurse rostering, the fairness of the constructed rosters has often been neglected. Solutions are typically evaluated by means of a weighted sum objective function which does not explicitly account for the fair distribution of individual high quality rosters. The present contribution aims at incorporating fairness measures in existing solution methods for the nurse rostering problem. Preliminary experimental results show that fairer solutions are obtained when applying the new fairness measures.