Abstract
In the variant of the well studied nurse rostering problem proposed in the Second International Nurse Rostering Competition, multiple stages have to be solved sequentially which are dependent on each other. We propose an integer programming model for this problem and show that a set of newly developed extensions in the form of additional constraints to deal with the incomplete information can significantly improve the quality of the generated solutions. We compare our solution approaches with the results obtained in the competition and show that the extended model achieves results competitive with the competition finalists.
Highlights
The automated generation of high quality staff schedules, in particular for hospitals, has been an important problem for over 40 years
We investigate solving a new nurse rostering problem by Integer Programming
The time limit was set to the time alloted by the benchmarking script3 provided for the International Nurse Rostering Competition (INRC-II)
Summary
The automated generation of high quality staff schedules, in particular for hospitals, has been an important problem for over 40 years. Salassa and Vanden Berghe (2012) denoted such a setting as a stepping horizon approach This multi-stage setting poses two unique challenges for solvers: The dependencies between weeks make it necessary to take the solutions of previous weeks into account during the evaluation of the quality of a schedule. We investigate solving a new nurse rostering problem (proposed in the INRC-II) by Integer Programming As in this problem a multi-stage formulation is used, the application of previous IP approaches is not sufficient to obtain good solutions that take into consideration future scheduling periods. This paper is an extension of work previously published in the proceedings of the 2016 conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling Mischek and Musliu (2016), which was further based on the first author’s master’s thesis [see Mischek (2016)]
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