AIM To describe a pilot project on self-scheduling (self-rostering) for hospital nurses and assess its potential values and difficulties in implementation. BACKGROUND Self-scheduling is one aspect of the effort to make the hospital nursing environment more accommodative of nurses' lives. It is part of the good employment practices that nurses want and that can help recruitment, retention and-...

The nurse rostering problem involves the assignment of shifts to nurses with respect to several constraints like workload, legal restrictions, and contractual agreements [9]. The complexity of the problem attracts many researchers around the world. Since the regulations, requirements, and agreements differ from country to country, the models and solution methods differ as well [9]. The solution...

This paper proposes effective genetic operators for cooperative genetic algorithm (GA) to solve a nurse scheduling problem. A clinical director of a medical department makes a duty schedule of all nurses of the department every month. Such the scheduling is very complex task. It takes one or two weeks to create the nurse schedule even by a veteran director. In conventional ways using the cooper...

Although dynamic programming could ideally solve any combinatorial optimization problem, the curse of dimensionality of the search space seriously limits its application to large optimization problems. For example, only few papers in the literature have reported the application of dynamic programming to workforce scheduling problems. This paper investigates approximate dynamic programming to ta...

In this paper, we provide all information to participate to the Second International Nurse Rostering Competition (INRC-II). First, we describe the problem formulation, which, differently from INRC-I, is a multi-stage procedure. Second, we illustrate all the necessary infrastructure do be used together with the participant’s solver, including the testbed, the file formats, and the validation/sim...

.................................................................................................................... 3 1. Introduction and Motivation ....................................................................... 3 2. Related Work ................................................................................................ 4 2.1 Release Planning for Evolving Systems ................

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...

In this paper, we used the fuzzy set theory for modeling flexible constraints and uncertain data in nurse scheduling problems and proposed a fuzzy linear model for nurse rostering problems. The developed model can produce rosters that satisfy hospital objectives, ward requirements and staff preferences by satisfying their requests as much as possible. Fuzzy sets are used for modeling demands of...

Our research has shown that schedules can be built mimicking a human scheduler by using a set of rules that involve domain knowledge. This chapter presents a Bayesian Optimization Algorithm (BOA) for the nurse scheduling problem that chooses such suitable scheduling rules from a set for each nurse’s assignment. Based on the idea of using probabilistic models, the BOA builds a Bayesian network f...