Staff scheduling is a complex combinatorial optimisation problem concerning allocation of staff to duty rosters in a wide range of industries and settings. This thesis presents a novel approach to solving staff scheduling problems, and in particular nurse scheduling, by simplifying the problem space through information granulation. The complexity of the problem is due to a large solution space ...

Nurse rostering is a complex scheduling problem that affects hospital personnel on a daily basis all over the world. The need for quality software solutions is acute for a number of reasons. In particular, it is very important to efficiently utilise time and effort, to evenly balance the workload among people and to attempt to satisfy personnel preferences. A high quality roster can lead to a m...

This paper proposes effective genetic operators for cooperative genetic algorithm (GA) to solve a nurse scheduling problem. A clinical director of a medical department makes a duty schedule of all nurses of the department every month. Such the scheduling is very complex task. It takes one or two weeks to create the nurse schedule even by a veteran director. In conventional ways using the cooper...

The simulated annealing was perceived as a useful method for many intractable problems. However, it needs additional strategies to cope with time complexity due to an initial state and search space reduction. In this work, we suggested an efficient transition rule and applied it to a nurse scheduling problem. It uses a cost matrix to reduce a set of candidates, which results in performance impr...

The 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 from the airlines’ internal agreements. Another goal is of the highest interest for airlines: since the overall satisfa...

Crew management is concerned with building the work schedules of crews needed to cover a planned timetable. This is a well-known problem in Operations Research and has been historically associated with airlines and mass-transit companies. More recently, railway applications have also come on the scene, especially in Europe. In practice, the overall crew management problem is decomposed into two...

Train crew management involves the development of a duty timetable for each of the drivers (crew) to cover a given train timetable in a rail transport organization. This duty timetable is spread over a certain period, known as the roster planning horizon. Train crew management may arise either from the planning stage, when the total number of crew and crew distributions are to be determined, or...

This paper describes a decision support methodologies for nurse rostering problem in a modern hospital environment. In particular, it is very important to efficiently utilise time and effort, to evenly balance the workload among people and to attempt to satisfy personnel preference. We presented a complete model to formulate all the complex real-world constraints, solution approach and Hybrid a...

The aim of this special issue of Queueing Systems is to highlight the role of queueing theory in sustaining and improving the quality of care in our health care system. On one hand, it aims at showing the possible impact of queueing theory on optimisation in health care. On the other hand, it aims at drawing health care to the attention of queueing theorists to further increase the number of co...

The nurse rostering problem consists in generating a configuration of daily schedules for a set of nurses satisfying a set of constraints. The problem is known to be computationally challenging as it must consider different requirements such as minimal area or floor allocations, different skills, working regulations, as well as personnel wishes. The literature presents several successful work d...