This paper analyses the adoption of energy-efficiency enhancing technologies by heterogeneous firms. The fact that energy use does not only cause external environmental costs through pollution, but also directly affects the profitability of the firm and hence its behaviour on input and output markets is taken for granted. It is demonstrated that the consideration of such market processes may ha...

The simulated annealing was perceived as a useful method for many intractable problems. However, it needs additional strategies to cope with time complexity due to an initial state and search space reduction. In this work, we suggested an efficient transition rule and applied it to a nurse scheduling problem. It uses a cost matrix to reduce a set of candidates, which results in performance impr...

Staff scheduling is a complex combinatorial optimisation problem concerning allocation of staff to duty rosters in a wide range of industries and settings. This thesis presents a novel approach to solving staff scheduling problems, and in particular nurse scheduling, by simplifying the problem space through information granulation. The complexity of the problem is due to a large solution space ...

Background and Objectives: In this paper, a real life nurse scheduling model is described based on the conditions in Iranian hospitals such as monthly shift rotation, consecutive morning and evening shifts and consecutive evening and night shift.   Methods: The developed model considers both hospital constraints and nurses’ preferences. Hospital constraints include assigning adequate qualifie...

The ConPlan project conducted by the German Research Center for Arti cial Intelligence in collaboration with the SIEDA Software house aimed at representing and solving nurse scheduling problems as a problem of optimizing constraint satisfaction. Shifts are assigned to the personnel complying with legal regulations, avoiding over-time work as far as possible and meeting as many additional requir...