In this communication a bi-criterion approach for the nominal Airlines Crew Rostering Problem is developed. The nominal Crew Rostering Problem considers the assignment of the crew staff to a set of pairings covering all the scheduled flights so that operations costs are minimized while its solution must meet hard constraints resulting from the safety regulations of Civil Aviation as well as fro...

Next to fuel costs, crew costs are the largest direct operating cost of airlines. Therefore much research has been devoted to the planning and scheduling of crews over the last thirty years. The planning and scheduling of crews is usually considered as two problems: the crew pairing problem and the crew assignment (rostering) problem. These problems are solved sequentially. In this paper we foc...

In this paper, a nurse-scheduling model is developed using mixed integer programming model. It is deployed to a general care ward to replace and automate the current manual approach for scheduling. The developed model differs from other similar studies in that it optimizes both hospital’s requirement as well as nurse preferences by allowing flexibility in the transfer of nurses from different d...

Since the nurse scheduling problem (NSP) is a problem of finding a feasible solution, the solution space must include infeasible solutions to solve it using a local search algorithm. However, the solution space consisting of all the solutions is so large that the search requires much CPU time. In the NSP, some constraints have higher priority. Thus, we can define the solution space to be the se...

In the last few years, a significant number of multi-objective metaheuristics have been proposed in the literature in order to address real-world problems. Local search methods play a major role in many of these metaheuristic procedures. In this paper, we adapt a recent and popular indicator-based selection method proposed by Zitzler and Künzli in 2004, in order to define a population-based mul...

Hyperheuristics can be defined to be heuristics which choose between heuristics in order to solve a given optimisation problem. The main motivation behind the development of such approaches is the goal of developing automated scheduling methods which are not restricted to one problem. In this paper we report the investigation of a hyperheuristic approach and evaluate it on various instances of ...

This paper describes a Genetic Algorithms approach to a manpower-scheduling problem arising at a major UK hospital. Although Genetic Algorithms have been successfully used for similar problems in the past, they always had to overcome the limitations of the classical Genetic Algorithms paradigm in handling the conflict between objectives and constraints. The approach taken here is to use an indi...

Guided Complete Search (GCS) is a generic framework for combining and coordinating a tree search solver and a secondary solver to yield a complete and efficient CSP solver. The primary solver of GCS is systematic tree search augmented with constraint propagation algorithm, which is used to maintain the completeness of the GCS solver. The secondary solver of GCS can either be a complete or incom...