The nurse rostering problem involves the assignment of shifts to nurses with respect to several constraints like workload, legal restrictions, and contractual agreements [9]. The complexity of the problem attracts many researchers around the world. Since the regulations, requirements, and agreements differ from country to country, the models and solution methods differ as well [9]. The solution...

Hospital wards must be staffed 24 hours a day by a limited number of nurses. With a well documented shortage of nurses in many countries, effective rostering of nurse shifts is crucial. Recent research on nurse rostering has focused on creating flexible rosters that are attractive to nurses, with the joint aims of improving the quality of care and increasing staff retention. To achieve this, so...

In this contribution, a generic two-phase stochastic variable neighborhood approach is applied to nurse rostering problems. The proposed algorithm is used for creating feasible and efficient nurse rosters for many different nurse rostering cases. In order to demonstrate the efficiency and generic applicability of the proposed approach, experiments with real-world input data coming from many dif...

The nurse rostering problem is an important search problem that features many constraints. In a nurse rostering problem, these constraints are defined by processes such as maintaining work regulations, assigning nurse shifts, and considering nurse preferences. A number of approaches to address these constraints, such as penalty function methods, have been investigated in the literature. We prop...

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...

Personnel rostering has received ample attention in recent years. Due to its social and economic relevance and due to its intrinsic complexity, it has become a major subject for scheduling and timetabling researchers. Among the personnel rostering problems, nurse rostering turned out to be particularly complex and difficult. In this paper, we propose a notation for nurse rostering problems alon...

This paper presents our investigations on a hybrid constraint programming based column generation (CP-CG) approach to nurse rostering problems. We present a complete model to formulate all the complex real-world constraints in several benchmark nurse rostering problems. The hybrid CP-CG approach is featured with not only the effective relaxation and optimality reasoning of linear programming bu...

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...

Nurse rostering is the process of creating a plan for nurse working hours over a given time horizon. This problem, most variants of which are NP-hard, has been studied extensively for many years. Still, practical nurse rostering is mostly done manually, often by highly qualified health care personnel. This underlines the need to address the challenges of realistic, applied nurse rostering, and ...

This paper presents the results of developing a branch and price algorithm and an ejection chain method for nurse rostering problems. The approach is general enough to be able to apply it to a wide range of benchmark nurse rostering instances. The majority of the instances are real world applications. They have been collected from a variety of sources including industrial collaborators, other r...