Hybrid swarm-based optimization algorithm of GA & VNS for nurse scheduling problem

  • Authors:

  • Zebin Zhang;Zhifeng Hao;Han Huang

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Computer, Guangdong University of Technology, China;School of Computer, Guangdong University of Technology, China;College of Business, City University of Hong Kong, China

  • Venue:
  • ICICA'11 Proceedings of the Second international conference on Information Computing and Applications
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

This paper presents a hybrid swarm-based optimization algorithm that combines genetic algorithm (GA) and variable neighborhood search (VNS) to deal with highly-constrained nurse scheduling problems in modern hospital environments. The problem is first divided into several sub-problems by the average principle. Then a genetic algorithm is used to solve the sub-problems including a subset of constraints. Better feasible solutions are built by a hybrid genetic algorithm; they are taken as the initial solution of the variable neighborhood search procedure. The proposed algorithm can be applied to other resource allocation problems with a large number of constraints. The experiment results show that our method can produce feasible solutions.