INTRODUCTION Hospital medicine is a young specialty that is still evolving. In its early years, research focused on clinical outcomes, efficiency, and cost effectiveness. As the specialty matures, increasing attention is being given to the patient and hospitalist experience with the hospitalist model of care. METHODS In 2008, we conducted a literature search to identify patients' and hospital...

Hyper-heuristics are high level improvement search methodologies exploring space of heuristics [4]. According to [5], hyper-heuristics can be categorized in many ways. A hyper-heuristic either selects from a set of available low level heuristics or generates new heuristics from components of existing low level heuristics to solve a problem, leading to a distinction between selection and generat...

Judith Shamian, RN, PhD, LLD (hon), D.Sci (hon), FAAN, is the president of the International Council of Nurses (ICN). Previous positions include immediate past president and CEO of the Victorian Order of Nurses, immediate past President of the Canadian Nurses Association (CNA), executive director of the Office of Nursing Policy at Health Canada and vice-president of nursing at Mount Sinai Hospi...

this paper considers the economic lot scheduling problem, that is, the problem of scheduling several products on a single facility so as to minimize holding and setup costs. combination of frequency and timing as well as production quantity make this problem np-hard. a heuristic is developed to obtain a good solution to elsp. the proposed heuristic makes use of the simulated annealing technique...

job shop scheduling problem has significant importance in many researchingfields such as production management and programming and also combinedoptimizing. job shop scheduling problem includes two sub-problems: machineassignment and sequence operation performing. in this paper combination ofparticle swarm optimization algorithm (pso) and gravitational search algorithm(gsa) have been presented f...

The Nurse Rostering Problem is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization, scheduling problem for assigning a set of nurses to shifts per day by considering both hard and soft constraints. A novel metaheuristic technique is required for solving Nurse Rostering Problem (NRP). This work proposes a metaheuristic technique called Directed Bee Colony Optimization Algorithm using the Modified Nelder-Mead ...

Constraint satisfaction problems have generally been recognized as a useful framework for many AI problems. Several notions of soft constraints have been suggested to infer uncertain knowledge as well as formulate optimization tasks. Additionally, the ability to represent optional requirements of experts on schedules or plans has been claimed by certain forms of soft constraints. In opposition ...

Operation rooms are significant cost drivers in hospitals. This is because of the expensive resources that are directly involved in surgery, and the indirect impact that operating room activities have on related activities and resources throughout the hospital. Surgery planning on different levels and time scales are thus central planning problems with strong interactions with other planning pr...

Constraint satisfaction problems have generally been recognized as a useful framework for the representation of many AI problems. Several notions of soft constraints have been suggested to infer uncertain knowledge as well as formulate optimization tasks. Additionally, the ability to represent it optional expert requirements on schedules or plans by certain forms of soft constraints has been cl...

Article history: Received April 17, 2012 Accepted 11 June 2012 Available online June 14 2012 One of the key challenges of nurse scheduling problem (NSP) is the number of constraints placed on preparing the timetable, both from the regulatory requirements as well as the patients’ demand for the appropriate nursing care specialists. In addition, the preferences of the nursing staffs related to th...