Orbital shrinking is a newly developed technique in the MIP community to deal with symmetry issues, which is based on aggregation rather than on symmetry breaking. In a recent work, a hybrid MIP/CP scheme based on orbital shrinking was developed for the multi-activity shift scheduling problem, showing significant improvements over previous pure MIP approaches. In the present paper we show that ...

This paper presents the problem of scheduling security teams to patrol a mass rapid transit rail network of a large urban city. The main objective of patrol scheduling is to deploy security teams to stations of the network at varying time periods subject to rostering as well as security-related constraints. We present several mathematical programming models for different variants of this proble...

This paper presents a genetic algorithmic approach to the solution of the problem of personnel timetabling in laboratories in which the objective is to assign tasks to employees and nurse scheduling in medical centre where the objectives are to assign staff to particular day in planning period and minimization of personnel cost by avoiding overtime pay. The personnel scheduling and timetabling ...

The aim of this research is twofold: Firstly, to model and solve a complex nurse scheduling problem with an integer programming formulation and evolutionary algorithms. Secondly, to detail a novel statistical method of comparing and hence building better scheduling algorithms by identifying successful algorithm modifications. The comparison method captures the results of algorithms in a single ...

Staff scheduling and rostering problems, with application in several application areas, from transportation systems to hospitals, have been widely addressed by researchers. This is not the case of hospitality services, which have been forgotten by the quantitative research literature. The purpose of this paper is to provide some insights on the application of staff scheduling and rostering prob...

The Nurse scheduling problem (NSP) of this paper is to study and analyze the scheduling process in practice, and propose models and heuristics to improve both the process and the quality of the resulting schedule. Nurses should benefit from this study by having higher quality schedules while the employees in charge of scheduling should enjoy the positive benefits of an optimization tool to solv...

This paper proposes an effective mutation operator for Cooperative Genetic Algorithm (CGA) to be applied to a practical Nurse Scheduling Problem (NSP). NSP is a complex combinatorial optimizing problem for which many requirements must be considered. The changes of the shift schedule yields various problems, for example, a drop in the nursing level. The author describes a technique of the reopti...