Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/157447 
Year of Publication: 
2015
Citation: 
[Journal:] Journal of Industrial Engineering International [ISSN:] 2251-712X [Volume:] 11 [Publisher:] Springer [Place:] Heidelberg [Year:] 2015 [Pages:] 439-458
Publisher: 
Springer, Heidelberg
Abstract: 
The nurse scheduling problem (NSP) has received a great amount of attention in recent years. In the NSP, the goal is to assign shifts to the nurses in order to satisfy the hospital's demand during the planning horizon by considering different objective functions. In this research, we focus on maximizing the nurses' preferences for working shifts and weekends off by considering several important factors such as hospital's policies, labor laws, governmental regulations, and the status of nurses at the end of the previous planning horizon in one of the largest hospitals in Iran i.e., Milad Hospital. Due to the shortage of available nurses, at first, the minimum total number of required nurses is determined. Then, a mathematical programming model is proposed to solve the problem optimally. Since the proposed research problem is NP-hard, a meta-heuristic algorithm based on simulated annealing (SA) is applied to heuristically solve the problem in a reasonable time. An initial feasible solution generator and several novel neighborhood structures are applied to enhance performance of the SA algorithm. Inspired from our observations in Milad hospital, random test problems are generated to evaluate the performance of the SA algorithm. The results of computational experiments indicate that the applied SA algorithm provides solutions with average percentage gap of 5.49 % compared to the upper bounds obtained from the mathematical model. Moreover, the applied SA algorithm provides significantly better solutions in a reasonable time than the schedules provided by the head nurses.
Subjects: 
Health systems
Nurse scheduling problem
Preference scheduling
Mathematical programming
Neighborhood structure
Meta-heuristic algorithms
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Article

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