A two-stage heuristic approach for a type of rotation assignment problem

Abstract

A two-stage heuristic algorithm is proposed for solving a trainee rotation assignment problem in a local school of nursing and its training hospital. At the first stage, the model is reduced to a simplified assignment problem and solved using a random search procedure. At the second stage, a problem-specific operator is designed and employed with a hill climber to further improve solutions. We benchmark our algorithm with instances generated based on the real-life rules. Results show that the proposed algorithm yields high-quality solutions in less computation time for large scale instances when compared with integer linear programming formulation using the commercial solver Cplex.