New computational results for the nurse scheduling problem: A scatter search algorithm

B. Maenhout and Mario Vanhoucke

Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School Working Paper Series from Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School

Abstract: In this paper, we present a scatter search algorithm for the well-known nurse scheduling problem (NSP). This problem aims at the construction of roster schedules for nurses taking both hard and soft constraints into account. The objective is to minimize the total preference cost of the nurses and the total penalty cost from violations of the soft constraints. The problem is known to be NP-hard. The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, we are, to the best of our knowledge, the first to present a scatter search algorithm for the NSP. Second, we investigate two different types of solution combination methods in the scatter search framework, based on four different cost elements. Last, we present detailed computational experiments on a benchmark dataset presented recently, and solve these problem instances under different assumptions. We show that our procedure performs consistently well under many different circumstances, and hence, can be considered as robust against case-specific constraints.

Keywords: meta-heuristics; scatter search; nurse scheduling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2006-04-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cmp
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.vlerick.be/en/2519-VLK/version/default/ ... /vlgms-wp-2006-06.pd (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.vlerick.be/en/2519-VLK/version/default/part/AttachmentData/data/vlgms-wp-2006-06.pd [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.vlerick.com/en/2519-VLK/version/default/part/AttachmentData/data/vlgms-wp-2006-06.pd)

Related works:
Working Paper: New Computational Results for the Nurse Scheduling Problem: A Scatter Search Algorithm (2005)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:vlg:vlgwps:2006-06

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School Working Paper Series from Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Isabelle Vandenbroere ().