The challenge in shift scheduling lies in the construction of a set of work shifts, which are subject to specific regulations, in order to cover fluctuating staff demands. This problem becomes harder when multiskill employees can perform many different activities during the same shift. In this paper, we show how formal languages (such as regular and context-free languages) can be enhanced and u...

The nurse scheduling problem (NSP) is a combinatorial optimisation problem widely tackled in the literature. Recently, a new variant of this problem was proposed, called nurse scheduling problem with balanced preference satisfaction (NSPBPS). This paper further investigates this variant of the NSP as we propose a new algorithm to solve the problem and obtain a better balance of overall preferen...

The ConPlan project conducted by the German Research Center for Arti cial Intelligence in collaboration with the SIEDA Software house aimed at representing and solving nurse scheduling problems as a problem of optimizing constraint satisfaction. Shifts are assigned to the personnel complying with legal regulations, avoiding over-time work as far as possible and meeting as many additional requir...

Airline crew rostering is an important part of airline operations and an interesting problem for the application of operations research. The objective is to assign anonymous crew pairings either to personalized rosters or to anonymous bidlines which subsequently will be assigned to individual crew members. Compared to the crew pairing problem, crew rostering has received much less attention in ...

The labor shift scheduling problem has traditionally been formulated using the set covering approach proposed by Dantzig, G.B. [1954. Operations Research 2 (3), 339±341]. The size of the resulting integer model with this approach, however, has been found to be very large to solve optimally in most practical applications. Recently, Bechtold, S.E., Jacobs, L.W. [1990. Management Science 36 (11), ...

Nurse scheduling is a difficult optimization problem with multiple constraints. There is extensive research in the literature solving the problem using meta-heuristics approaches. In this paper, we will investigate an intelligent search heuristics that handles cost based scheduling problem. The heuristics demonstrated superior performances compared to the original algorithms used to solve the p...

2 ABSTRACT This paper is concerned with the application of a GRASP approach to a nurse-scheduling problem in which the objective is to optimise a set of preferences subject to a set of binding constraints. The balance between feasibility and optimality is a key issue. This is addressed by using a knapsack model to ensure that the solutions produced by the construction heuristic are easy to repa...

This paper tackles a Nurse Scheduling Problem which consists of generating work schedules for a set of nurses while considering their shift preferences and other requirements. The objective is to maximize the satisfaction of nurses’ preferences and minimize the violation of soft constraints. This paper presents a new deterministic heuristic algorithm, called MAPA (multi-assignment problem-based...

Nurse Rostering problems represent a subclass of scheduling problems that are hard to solve. Their complexity is due to the large solution spaces and the many objectives and constraints that need to be fulfilled. In this study, we propose a hierarchical method of granulation of problem domain through preprocessing of constraints. A set of zero-cost patterns in the granulated search space provid...

This paper presents an integer programming formulation for integrating maintenance planning tasks in the railway rolling stock circulation problem. This is a key problem in railway rostering planning that requires to cover a given set of services and maintenance works with a minimum amount of rolling stock units. An additional objective is to limit the number of empty rides. The constraints of ...