Nurse rostering is a complex scheduling problem that affects hospital personnel on a daily basis all over the world. The need for quality software solutions is acute for a number of reasons. In particular, it is very important to efficiently utilise time and effort, to evenly balance the workload among people and to attempt to satisfy personnel preferences. A high quality roster can lead to a m...

We discuss the self-rostering problem, a concept receiving more and more attention from both theory and practice. We outline our methodology and discuss its application to a number of practical case studies.

Matrix models are ubiquitous for constraint problems. Many such problems have a matrix of variablesM, with the same constraint defined by a finitestate automaton A on each row of M and a global cardinality constraint gcc on each column of M. We give two methods for deriving, by double counting, necessary conditions on the cardinality variables of the gcc constraints from the automaton A. The fi...

The stretch constraint occurs in many rostering problems that arise in the industrial and public service sectors. In this paper we present an efficient algorithm for domain consistency propagation of the stretch constraint. Using benchmark and random instances, we show that this stronger consistency sometimes enables our propagator to solve more difficult problems than a previously proposed pro...

The rostering problem consists in finding an optimal assignment of shifts to workers in a given time horizon. When the total workload should be evenly distributed, we have a balanced rostering problem. We consider a practical application to the junk removal company in Crema, Italy. In this case, predefined daily shifts must be assigned to the drivers in a fair way. However, the drivers have lim...

One significant task addressed during software development project is to determine which features should be covered by the application that is being developed. This problem is known as the Next Release Problem (NRP) and has been solved using metaheuristic search techniques. We show how to apply these techniques by its embedding into a requirement management tool as an assistant functionality. W...

Nurse scheduling is a topic widely studied due to its overall effect on patient care and hospital performance. This research focuses formulating Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) workforce model as nurse rostering problem. The incorporates multiple objectives of individual preference qualification. approached by categorizing nurses into different hierarchical levels based their qualifications pos...