GHENT
UNIVERSITY
Faculty of Economics and Business Administration
OPERATIONS RESEARCH AND SCHEDULING
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Faculty of Economics and Business Administration OPERATIONS RESEARCH AND SCHEDULING |
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Download a problem generator, benchmark data instances and the executables to solve the Nurse Scheduling Problem On this webpage, you can download the benchmark instances, best known solutions, a problem generator as well as executables for various meta-heuristic procedures to solve the nurse scheduling problem. The NSP involves the construction of duty rosters for nursing staff and assigns nurses to shifts within the planning period in order to meet the minimal coverage constraints and other case-specific constraints and to maximize the quality of the assigned schedules. The objective maximizes the nurses’ preferences and minimizes the total penalty cost of violating soft constraints. 1. The problem instance generator NSPGen The problem generator NSPGen as well as more information (the paper and a small tutorial) can be downloaded here.
2. The problem instance library NSPLib The problem instances of NSPLib, containing different sub-sets of instances and case-specific constraint files, as well as more information (the paper and a small tutorial) can be downloaded here.
3. Solution procedures All algorithms report solutions on the proposed benchmark dataset NSPLib generated by NSPGen. The executables, as well as information files, can be downloaded for each meta-heuristic procedure. Currently, we have only results for one meta-heuristic procedure under section “3.1. An electromagnetic meta-heuristic procedure”.
The best known solutions can be downloaded here. Note that we also encourage researchers to send newly tested nurse scheduling problem instances and new case constraint files.
3.1. An electromagnetic meta-heuristic procedure
Reference: Maenhout, B. and Vanhoucke, M., 2005, “An Electromagnetism meta-heuristic for the nurse scheduling problem”, accepted for publication in Journal of Heuristics 3.2. An scatter search procedure
Reference: Maenhout, B. and Vanhoucke, M., 2006, “New Computational Results for the Nurse Scheduling Problem: A Scatter Search Algorithm”, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 3906, 158-170. 3.3. A (hybrid) genetic algorithm
Reference: Maenhout, B. and Vanhoucke, M., 2005, “Comparison and Hybridization of Crossover Operators for the Nurse Scheduling problem”, submitted to Annals of Operations Research |
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