Branching strategies in a branch-and-price approach for a multiple objective nurse scheduling problem |
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Authors: | Broos Maenhout Mario Vanhoucke |
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Affiliation: | (1) Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Gent, Belgium;(2) Operations & Technology Management Centre, Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School, Gent, Belgium |
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Abstract: | 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 care. In this paper, we consider the rostering over a mid-term period that involves
the construction of duty timetables for a set of heterogeneous nurses. In scheduling nursing personnel, the head nurse is
typically confronted with various (conflicting) goals complying with different priority levels which represent the hospital’s
policies and the nurses’ preferences. In constructing a nurse roster, nurses need to be assigned to shifts in order to maximize
the quality of the constructed timetable satisfying the case-specific time related constraints imposed on the individual nurse
schedules. Personnel rostering in healthcare institutions is a highly constrained and difficult problem to solve and is known
to be NP-hard. In this paper, we present an exact branch-and-price algorithm for solving the nurse scheduling problem incorporating
multiple objectives and discuss different branching and pruning strategies. Detailed computational results are presented comparing
the proposed branching strategies and indicating the beneficial effect of various principles encouraging computational efficiency. |
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