We present a new technique (RIIPS) for solving rostering problems in the presence of service uncertainty. RIIPS stands for “Rostering by Iterating Integer Programming and Simulation”. RIIPS allows great complexity of the stochastic system being rostered. This modelling freedom comes at a price, as the approach can be extremely computationally intensive. Therefore any reduction in computational ...

This paper describes the design and implementation of a nurse rostering system using a redundant modeling approach. Nurse rostering is defined as a process of generating timetables for specifying the work shifts of nurses over a given period of time. This process is difficult because the human roster planner has to ensure that every rostering decision made complies with a mixture of hard hospit...

An important new feature on the business scene is the development of call centres, whereby a pool of staff is used to answer incoming calls from customers. This project develops a model that enables staffing levels to be determined to meet specified quality targets on customer wait times. Unlike most previous work, this new model explicitly considers call arrival rates that vary during the day,...

Nowadays, nurses scheduling is one of the most important challenges with which health care centers are encountered. The significance of nurses’ work quality has led researchers to be concerned about scheduling problems, which have an impact on nurses’ performance. Observing the interests of hospital and patients, providing their satisfaction, and meeting their needs are among the main objective...

The production of effective workforce rosters is a common management problem. Rostering problems are highly constrained and require extensive experience to solve manually. The decisions made by expert rosterers are often subjective and are difficult to represent systematically. This paper presents a formal description of a new technique for capturing rostering experience using case-based reason...

In her review of the National Reading Panel's (NRP) report on phonics,Elaine Garan concluded that the report involved "a limited number of studies of a narrow population. . ."1 In this note, I will argue that this problem is not limited to the section on phonics: It also applies to the NRP's section on "fluency." It is only by omitting a large number of relevant studies, and misinterpreting the...

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...

Hospital wards must be staffed 24 hours a day by a limited number of nurses. With a well documented shortage of nurses in many countries, effective rostering of nurse shifts is crucial. Recent research on nurse rostering has focused on creating flexible rosters that are attractive to nurses, with the joint aims of improving the quality of care and increasing staff retention. To achieve this, so...

This paper presents a case study commissioned by the Spanish railway carrier Ferrocariles Españoles de Vı́a Estrecha for the annual rostering of work schedules for station personnel. A mixed rostering process is used. The first part of the process is carried out manually with the aid of a spreadsheet and Visual Basic, and consists of designing an initial graphic with 4-week patterns for each sta...

We introduce tractable classes of VCSP instances based on convex cost functions. Firstly, we show that the class of VCSP instances satisfying the hierarchically nested convexity property is tractable. This class generalises our recent results on VCSP instances satisfying the non-overlapping convexity property by dropping the assumption that the input functions are non-decreasing [3]. Not only d...