This work presents Integer Programming (IP) techniques to tackle the problem of the International Nurse Rostering Competition. Starting from a compact and monolithic formulation in which the current generation of solvers performs poorly, improved cut generation strategies and primal heuristics are proposed and evaluated. A large number of computational experiments with these techniques produced...

Nurse Rostering Problems (NRPs) consist of generating rosters where required shifts are assigned to nurses over a scheduling period satisfying a number of constraints. In [25], we have shown how soft global constraints can be used to model NRPs in a concise and elegant way. In this paper we go one step further by proposing new neighborhood heuristics for VNS/LDS+CP. Experiments show that, despi...

In this paper, an empirical study on self-generating multimeme memetic algorithms is presented. A set of well known benchmark functions is used during the experiments. Moreover, a heuristic template is introduced for solving timetabling problems. The heuristics designed based on this template can utilize a set of constraint-based hill climbers in a cooperative manner. Two such adaptive heuristi...

This paper describes the Rostering Engine (RE) that we have developed for the Hospital Authority (HA), Hong Kong as part of their Staff Rostering System (SRS) using AI constraint-programming techniques. The Hospital Authority manages over 40 public hospitals in Hong Kong. With close to 1500 wards total, the amount of resources needed to produce weekly staff rosters for each ward is tremendous a...

The nurse rostering problem refers to the assignment of nurses daily shifts according required demand each shift and day, with consideration for operational requirements nurses’ preferences. This is known be an NP-hard problem, difficult solved using exact solution methods especially large size instances. Mostly, this modeled soft hard constraint, objective set minimize violations constraints. ...

In this paper, a hybridization of Harmony Search Algorithm (HSA) with a greedy shuffle move is proposed for Nurse Rostering Problem (NRP). NRP is a combinatorial optimization problem that is tackled by assigning a set of nurses with different skills and contracts to different types of shifts, over a pre-determined scheduling period. HSA is a population-based method which mimics the improvisatio...