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...

The efficient 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 scheduling process affects highly the nurses’ working conditions, which are strongly related to the provided quality of...

In this paper, we present a scatter search algorithm for the well-known nurse scheduling problem (NSP). This problem aims at the construction of roster schedules for nurses taking both hard and soft constraints into account. The objective is to minimize the total preference cost of the nurses...

Managing nursing personnel properly is of critical importance as these resources comprise a vast share of the hospital's operational costs. The organizational support and the managerial policy decisions on the scheduling level are important determinants for the nurses' working conditions and the...

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 organizational structure and the organizational processes highly affect the nurses’ working conditions...