A HYBRID VARIABLE NEIGHBOURHOOD SEARCH AND DYNAMIC PROGRAMMING APPROACH FOR THE NURSE ROSTERING PROBLEM

Abstract

Nurse Rostering is the activity of assigning nurses to daily shifts in order to satisfy the cover requirements, taking into account the operational requirements and nurses' preferences. The problem is usually modeled as sets of hard and soft constraints with an ob jective function to minimize violations of soft constraints. The nurse rostering problem is known to be NP-hard. Many metaheuristics were used to tackle this problem. One of the frequently used heuristics is the Variable Neighbourhood Search (VNS). The VNS is usually used as a standalone method or in integration with another exact or heuristic method. In this paper, a new hybrid VNS and Dynamic Programming based heuristic approach is proposed to handle the nurse rostering problem. In the proposed approach, two perturbation mechanisms are adopted simultaneously. The proposed approach is tested on two different benchmark data sets. A comparison with state-of-the-art methods from literature revealed the competitive performance of the proposed approach.