Nurse scheduling system based on dynamic weighted maximal constraint satisfaction problem - Solution stability based on the provisional constraint

Abstract

Scheduling has been an important research field in Artificial Intelligence. Because typical scheduling problems could be modeled as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem(CSP), several constraint satisfaction techniques have been proposed. In order to handle the different levels of importance of the constraints, solving a problem as a Weighted Maximal Constraint Satisfaction Problem(W-MaxCSP) is an promising approach. However, there exists the case where unexpected events are added and some sudden changes are required, i.e., the case with dynamic changes in scheduling problems. In this paper, we describe such dynamic scheduling problem as a Dynamic Weighted Maximal Constraint Satisfaction Problem(DW-MaxCSP) in which constraints would changes dynamically. Generally, it is undesirable to determine vastly modified schedule even if re-scheduling is needed. A new schedule should be close to the current one as much as possible. In order to obtain stable solutions, we propose the methodology to maintain portions of the current schedule using the provisional soft constraints, which explicitly penalize the changes from the current schedule. We have experimentally confirmed the efficacy of re-scheduling based on our method with provisional constraints. In this paper, we construct the nurse scheduling system for applying the proposed scheduling method.