The nurse rostering problem: A critical appraisal of the problem structure

Towards a reference model for timetabling and rostering

“…Glass and Knight (2009), Messelis et al (2009) and Vanhoucke and Maenhout (2009). If the reference model has to provide reliable information about the applicability of a specific technique for a specific problem, such measures are indispensable.…”

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

“…Despite possible differences between countries, the core problem remains the same: assign a shift or day-off to each nurse on each day of the scheduling period, taking into account a set of personal, organisational and legislative constraints. The academic literature offers many different solution techniques to this problem, ranging from exact methods [55,85] over metaheuristics [82,90] to hybrid approaches [40,118]. Although the problem has received considerable attention in the last decades, several important open issues remain in the academic literature.…”

“…The idea of systematically considering information from the previous period has been explored by only a few authors in the context of personnel rostering. Glass and Knight [55] discuss issues regarding continuity in the ORTEC01 benchmark instance. Two ideas are presented to address these problems: 1) adding specialised continuity constraints at the start of the scheduling period, and 2) counting additional implied penalties to avoid large, avoidable penalties in the next scheduling period.…”

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

“…Publications treating this issue are by Glass and Knight (2010), Salassa and Vanden Berghe (2012) and Smet et al (2016), who developed and formalized various strategies to consistently include the results of previous stages in the evaluation of the current schedule. Their findings have largely been included in the rules for constraint evaluation of the INRC-II.…”