Citation

Rahimian, E; Akartunali, K and Levine, J A Hybrid Constraint Integer Programming Approach to Solve Nurse Scheduling Problems. In proceedings of the 7th Multidisciplinary International Conference on Scheduling : Theory and Applications (MISTA 2015), 25 - 28 Aug 2015, Prague, Czech Republic, pages 429-442, 2015.

Paper


Abstract

The Nurse Scheduling Problem can be simply defined as assigning a series of shift sequences (schedules) to several nurses over a planning horizon according to some constraints and preferences. The inherent benefits of having higher-quality and more flexible schedules are a reduction in outsourcing costs and an increase of job satisfaction in health organizations. In this paper, we present a novel systematic hybrid algorithm, which combines Integer Programming (IP) and Constraint Programming (CP) to efficiently solve highly-constrained Nurse Scheduling Problems. Our focus is to exploit the problem-specific information to improve the performance of the algorithm, and therefore obtain high-quality solutions as well as strong lower bounds. We test our algorithm based on some real-world benchmark instances. Very competitive results are reported compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms from the recent literature, showing that the proposed algorithm is able to solve a wide variety of real-world instances with different complex structures.


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Bibtex

@INPROCEEDINGS{2015-429-442-P, author = { E. Rahimian and K. Akartunali and J. Levine },
title = {A Hybrid Constraint Integer Programming Approach to Solve Nurse Scheduling Problems},
booktitle = {In proceedings of the 7th Multidisciplinary International Conference on Scheduling : Theory and Applications (MISTA 2015), 25 - 28 Aug 2015, Prague, Czech Republic},
year = {2015},
editor = {Z. Hanzalek and G. Kendall and B. McCollum and P. Sucha},
pages = {429--442},
note = {Paper},
abstract = { The Nurse Scheduling Problem can be simply defined as assigning a series of shift sequences (schedules) to several nurses over a planning horizon according to some constraints and preferences. The inherent benefits of having higher-quality and more flexible schedules are a reduction in outsourcing costs and an increase of job satisfaction in health organizations. In this paper, we present a novel systematic hybrid algorithm, which combines Integer Programming (IP) and Constraint Programming (CP) to efficiently solve highly-constrained Nurse Scheduling Problems. Our focus is to exploit the problem-specific information to improve the performance of the algorithm, and therefore obtain high-quality solutions as well as strong lower bounds. We test our algorithm based on some real-world benchmark instances. Very competitive results are reported compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms from the recent literature, showing that the proposed algorithm is able to solve a wide variety of real-world instances with different complex structures. },
owner = {Graham},
timestamp = {2017.01.16},
webpdf = {2015-429-442-P.pdf} }