Non-liner Great Deluge Algorithm for Handling Nurse Rostering Problem

The optimisation of the nurse rostering problem is chosen in this work due to its importance as an optimisation challenge with an availability to improve the organisation in hospitals duties, also due to its relevance to elevate the health care through an enhancement of the quality in a decision making process. Nurse rostering in the real world is naturally difficult and complex problem. It consists on the large number of demands and requirements that conflicts the hospital workload constraints with the employees work regulations and personal preferences. In this paper, we proposed a modified version of great deluge algorithm (GDA). GDA usually explores neighbouring solutions which are accepted if they are better than the best solution so far or if the detriment in quality is no larger than the current water level. In the original GDA, the water level decreases steadily in a linear technique. In this work, we modified the decay rate of the water level into a nonlinear fashion. Computational results were measured with three complexity levels as a total of 30 variant instances based on real-world constraints.