ORAHS2024
Abstract Submission

256. A matheuristic approach for solving nurse rostering problems

Contributed abstract in session ME-5: Workforce Planning, stream Regular talks.

Monday, 15:30-16:40
Room: Room S6

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Cristian Belfiore
de-Health Lab - Laboratory of Decision Engineering for Health Care Services - DIMEG, Università della Calabria
2. Rosita Guido
Department of Mechanical, Energy and Management Engineering, University of Calabria
3. Domenico Conforti
DIMEG, Università della Calabria

Abstract

The Nurse Rostering Problem is a challenging staff scheduling problem that aims to assign a set of nurses to shifts within a scheduling horizon. Nurses are characterized by one or more skills, are hired through a contract that regulates their work, and can express preferences about days off or work shifts. A preferred coverage is defined for each shift in the planning horizon, representing the number of nurses the hospital would like to have. Assignments have to satisfy sets of constraints derived from
internal hospital rules and legal requirements and must consider the preferences expressed by nurses. The main goal is to ensure adequate shift coverage while maximizing staff satisfaction and workload balance.
In this study, a version of the problem proposed in the literature was addressed through a revised version of the matheuristic FiNeMath. The proposed solution approach starts by finding a solution that is feasible for a relaxed version of the problem.
This is then iteratively refined through the combination of several destruction operators used to define neighbourhoods. Each destructed solution is repaired by exact approaches.
The approach was tested on small and medium benchmark instances. Preliminary results have shown that the matheuristic can determine high quality solutions in a relatively short time.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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