Title
A greedy-based neighborhood search approach to a nurse rostering problem
Abstract
A practical nurse rostering problem, which arises at a ward of an Italian hospital, is considered. The nurse rostering problem is a typical employee timetabling problem, where each month it is required to generate the nursing staff shifts subject to various contractual and operational requirements. These requirements may be in conflict especially for those months in which manpower is reduced due to seasonal holidays. It is required to consider both holidays planning and parametric contractual constraints, but no cyclic schedules and corresponding weekly patterns. A local search approach is introduced which is based on a neighborhood operating on partial solutions completed by means of a greedy procedure so as to avoid the generation of infeasible solutions. Both a tabu search procedure and an iterated local search procedure are proposed. The solutions computed by the proposed procedures compare well with respect to a straightforward lower bound and strongly outperform those manually generated in the hospital ward. The proposed approach is now currently used on site.
Year
DOI
Venue
2004
10.1016/S0377-2217(03)00096-1
European Journal of Operational Research
Keywords
Field
DocType
Nurse rostering,Tabu search,Iterated local search
Guided Local Search,Upper and lower bounds,Nurse scheduling problem,Operations management,Iterated local search,Mathematical optimization,Nursing,Operations research,Schedule,Parametric statistics,Local search (optimization),Tabu search,Mathematics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
153
1
0377-2217
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
40
1.75
6
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
F. Bellanti1401.75
Giuliana Carello226722.27
Federico Della Croce339941.60
Roberto Tadei466747.45