Nursing staff is principally cyclically scheduled in various hospitals in Belgium. The employed cyclic schedules embody, however, only a weak reflection of the ultimate nurse rosters constructed for a specific month. In this paper we investigate the benefits of integrating nurse-specific characteristics in the cyclic scheduling approach. Moreover, we analyze to what extent these characteristics...

This paper describes the first Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) Algorithm approach applied to nurse scheduling evaluated under different working environments. For this purpose, the model has been applied on a real hospital where data taken from different departments of the hospital were used and the schedules from the model were compared with the existing schedules. The results obtained indicated th...

The objective of this study was to analyze hospital staff nurses' shift length, scheduling characteristics, and nurse reported safety and quality. A secondary analysis of a large nurse survey linked with hospital administrative data was conducted. More than 22 000 registered nurses' reports of shift length and scheduling characteristics were examined. Extended shift lengths were associated with...

We applied genetic algorithm to nurse scheduling problem. For time complexity problem of genetic algorithm, we suggested efficient operators using a cost bit matrix of which each cell indicates any violation of constraints. A cell with 1 indicates that the corresponding assignment violates constraints and needs no further consideration. The experimental results showed that the suggested method ...

Nurse Rostering Problem (NRP) or the Nurse Scheduling Problem (NSP) is a complex scheduling problem that affects hospital personnel on a daily basis all over the world and is known to be NP-hard.The problem is to decide which members of a team of nurses should be on duty at any time, during a rostering period of, typically, one month.It is very important to efficiently utilize time and effort, ...

This paper looks at work done on a case-based workforce scheduling application. Generalised patterns of workforce allocation are used to build up a schedule that is then adjusted to remove any problems. Because some constraint elements are incorporated in the case-base, the global problem search space is reduced. The case-base can be maintained either automatically, by generalisation of solutio...

Self-rostering is receiving more and more attention in literature and in practice. With self-rostering, employees propose the schedule they prefer to work during a given planning horizon. However, these schedules often do not match with the staffing demand as specified by the organization. We present an approach to support creating feasible schedules that uses the schedules proposed by the empl...

This special volume is focused upon a selection of the papers that were presented at the 9th International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling (PATAT) in Son, Norway, between 28th and 31st August, 2012. The PATAT conferences are held biennially. This is the third occasion that we have employed the Annals of Operations Research as the forum for a revised and selected c...