A General Approach to the Physician Rostering Problem

This paper presents a hybridization of a Constraint Programming (CP) model and search techniques with Local Search (LS) and some ideas borrowed from Genetic Algorithms (GA). The context is the physician rostering problem, whose instances can vary greatly and for which almost no general tool has been developed. It is hoped that the combination of the three techniques will lead to an algorithm that has sufficient flexibility to solve most instances with a small amount of customization. To achieve this goal we also introduce Generic constraints: these constraints are used to model several types of ergonomic constraints that are found amongst physician rostering problems.