A categorisation of nurse rostering problems

Abstract

Personnel rostering has received ample attention in recent years. Due to its social and economic relevance and due to its intrinsic complexity, it has become a major subject for scheduling and timetabling researchers. Among the personnel rostering problems, nurse rostering turned out to be particularly complex and difficult. In this paper, we propose a notation for nurse rostering problems along the lines of the α|β|γ notation for scheduling. The system allows extension as well as refinement. It is the aim of the notation to facilitate problem description, classification and systematic study. It enables authors to position the problems in the vaster body of research on the subject. By developing this notation for nurse rostering, we hope that an extension of it will be applicable to a broader domain of personnel rostering.

Employee substitutability as a tool to improve the robustness in personnel scheduling

“…The shift assignments cover multiple categorical skills, which means that employees are fully capable of executing a duty in correspondence with their skills and the individual skills cannot be hierarchically ranked (Bruecker et al 2015). The personnel characteristics and shift characteristics are common in personnel scheduling literature (Burke et al 2004;Van den Bergh et al 2013) and the model can be categorised as AS 2|RV |S||L RG according to the classification of De Causmaecker and Vanden Berghe (2011). In this phase, we introduce the concept of employee substitutability on the level of an individual employee (Sect.…”

Dynamic Programming with Approximation Function for Nurse Scheduling

“…In non-cyclic scheduling, nurse shift preferences are considered which limits such replication of shift patters. Surveys such as [5,6] provide detailed reviews of terminology, constraints and objectives. In this paper we tackle the non-cyclic NSP.…”

“…A wide range of methodologies, such as constraint programming and metaheuristics have been applied to solve nurse scheduling problems and achieving very good solutions [5,6]. However, it seems that no paper has applied dynamic programming directly to solve this type of problem due to the curse of dimensionality.…”

Nurse rostering: models and algorithms for theory, practice and integration with other problems

“…De Causmaecker and Vanden Berghe [38] introduced a notation based on the α|β|γ notation for scheduling problems, to describe and classify nurse rostering problems based on the presence or absence of specific problem characteristics. Where possible, the concepts discussed in this chapter are situated in this classification scheme.…”