We present a hybrid approach of goal programming and meta-heuristic search to find compromise solutions for a difficult employee scheduling problem, i.e. nurse rostering with many hard and soft constraints. By employing a goal programming model with different parameter settings in its objective...

This paper presents a hybrid multi-objective model that combines integer programming (IP) and variable neighbourhood search (VNS) to deal with highly-constrained nurse rostering problems in modern hospital environments. An IP is first used to solve the subproblem which includes the full set of...

This paper presents a state transition based formal framework for a new search method, called Evolutionary Ruin and Stochastic Recreate, which tries to learn and adapt to the changing environments during the search process. It improves the performance of the original Ruin and Recreate principle...