Scheduling using tabu search methods with intensification and diversification

Abstract

After spending five years in Medical School, physician students have to complete additional study including several interships before becoming full members of their professional guild. In this paper, we deal with the annual scheduling of internships taking into account the supervision capacities of the hospitals. The problem is modeled as an assignment-type problem. Several variants of Tabu Search procedures including intensification and diversification strategies are proposed and tested to deal with this problem. The numerical results indicate that the solution quality can be improved using intensification and diversification, at the expense of increasing solution time. © 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd.