Integer programming techniques for the nurse rostering problem

Abstract

This work presents Integer Programming (IP) techniques to tackle the problem of the International Nurse Rostering Competition. Starting from a compact and monolithic formulation in which the current generation of solvers performs poorly, improved cut generation strategies and primal heuristics are proposed and evaluated. A large number of computational experiments with these techniques produced the following results: the optimality of the vast majority of instances was proved, the best known solutions were improved by up to 15% and strong dual bounds were obtained. In the spirit of reproducible science, all code was implemented using the Computational Infrastructure for Operations Research (COIN-OR).

A hybrid artificial bee colony for a nurse rostering problem

“…Santos et al [39], presented Integer Programming technique to tackle the problem by decomposing the problem into subproblems. The violations of these subproblems are handled as must as possible to speed up the improvement of feasible solutions.…”

Optimal duty rostering for toll enforcement inspectors

“…The authors present mathematical programming approaches very similar to ours, but the main difference is that in a hospital a certain staff coverage is mandatory on each day and time of day. A successful application of Integer Programming methods to nurse rostering is presented in a recent publication by Santos et al (2014). For general rostering problems, we refer to Ernst et al (2004) for an annotated bibliography.…”

Integer programming model extensions for a multi-stage nurse rostering problem

“…For this (single-stage) problem, Santos et al (2016) provided an IP formulation and proposed techniques to improve the performance of IP solvers based on this formulation, by providing good dual and primal bounds. Valouxis et al (2012) proposed a two phase approach for the INRC2010 problem.…”