Purpose -Nurse scheduling problem is a key issue in strategic management in healthcare institutes. To improve the current manual-made nurse schedule, this paper presents a hybrid heuristic approach to generate weekly nurse schedule for a local Emergency Department (ED) in Hong Kong. Design/methodology/approach -A two-stage method is developed for the above purpose. In the first stage, approve-i...

Motivated by the current research in data centers and cloud computing, we study the problem of scheduling a set of two-stage jobs on multiple two-stage flowshops. A new formulation for configurations of such scheduling is proposed, which leads directly to improvements to the complexity of scheduling algorithms for the problem. Motivated by the observation that the costs of the two stages can be...

In this paper, we propose a deterministic shift design model with task-based demand and give the corresponding stochastic version probability constraint such that plan designed is staffed workforce certain of performing all given tasks. Since currently find no suitable methods for solving from literature related to models, developed single-stage heuristic method based on statistics, whose main ...

The production facilities of some factories can be considered as a flowshops. Flowshops are composed of resources arranged serially in r sections or stages where a set of n parts is processed. There are buffers between two consecutive stages. Each part has at most r operations (one per stage) and the flow of the jobs is oneway from stage 1 to stage r. In some companies of this type, the input s...

Each of n jobs is to be processed without interruption on one of m unrelated parallel machines. The objective is to minimize the maximum completion time. A heuristic method is presented, the first stage of which uses linear programming to form a partial schedule leaving at most m 1 jobs unscheduled: the second stage schedules these m1 jobs using an enumerative method. For m 2 3, it is shown tha...

A systematic study of two-staged upgrading process of vacuum residue for light fuel production has been carried out in a semi-batch binary reactor apparatus over Y, ZSM-5 and alkaline treated ZSM-5 zeolites. Prepared catalyst samples were characterized with XRD and BET. Density and Viscosity physical properties parameters estimation, as well as GC/SIMDIS analyses were conducted on liquid produc...

We consider the problem of determining (for a short lifecycle) retail product initial and replenishment order quantities that minimize the cost of lost sales, back orders, and obsolete inventory. We model this problem as a two-stage stochastic dynamic program, propose a heuristic, establish conditions under which the heuristic finds an optimal solution, and report results of the application of ...

This paper presents a Tabu Search Algorithm (TSA) for container loading problems with a container to be loaded. The TSA is based on a two-stage procedural approach. While alternative stowing plans are generated directly using an integrated greedy heuristic, the execution of the heuristic is controlled by means of a superior Tabu Search. The TSA considers several restrictions of practical releva...