Personnel resources are a variable and dynamic resource that introduce uncertainty in the operational processes. Constructed personnel rosters can be disrupted and render infeasible rosters. Feasibility has to be restored by adapting the original announced nurse rosters. In this paper, we...

In 2007, Brussels Airlines encountered a chronic shortage of pilots leading to a high and unbalanced workload, dissatisfied pilots, and a high turnover rate. The crew rostering process of Brussels Airlines is characterized as a manual preferential fair share process. The successful application...

In this paper we study the characteristics of population based meta-heuristics that distinguish the procedures from a standard meta-heuristic and that positively contribute to the quality of the solutions obtained. More precisely, we investigate and discuss the importance of a wellconsidered...

Personnel costs typically are the second largest costs for airline operations after fuel costs. Since efficient crew employment can drastically reduce operational costs of airline companies, the crew scheduling problem in the airline industry has been extensively investigated in the operations...

In this paper, we propose different complexity indicators for the well-known nurse scheduling problem (NSP). The NSP assigns nurses to shifts per day taking both hard and soft constraints into account. The objective is to maximize the nurses’ preferences and to minimize the total penalty cost...

The efficient and effective management of nursing personnel is of critical importance in a hospital’s environment comprising a vast share of the hospital’s operational costs. The nurse workforce management process highly affects the nurses’ working conditions which are strongly related to...

The crew scheduling problem in the airline industry is extensively investigated in the operations research literature since efficient crew employment can drastically reduce operational costs of airline companies. Given the flight schedule of an airline company, crew scheduling is the process of...

In this paper, we present a novel meta-heuristic technique for the nurse scheduling problem (NSP). This well-known scheduling problem assigns nurses to shifts per day taking both hard and soft constraints into account. The objective is to maximize the preferences of the nurses and to minimize...

Nursing staff is principally cyclically scheduled in various hospitals in Belgium. The employed cyclic schedules embody, however, only a weak reflection of the ultimate nurse rosters constructed for a specific month. In this paper we investigate the benefits of integrating nurse-specific...

In this paper, we present a hybrid genetic algorithm for the well-known nurse scheduling problem (NSP). The NSP involves the construction of roster schedules for nursing staff in order to maximize the quality of the roster schedule and to minimize the violations of the minimal coverage...