Chemical Reaction Optimization for Nurse Rostering Problem
Chemical reaction optimization (CRO) method is a relative new nature-inspired algorithm. It searches solutions in the problem space by simulating the molecules movement happened during the chemical reaction process. This method has been applied to many pr
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Chemical Reaction Optimization for Nurse Rostering Problem Ziran Zheng and Xiaoju Gong
Abstract Chemical reaction optimization (CRO) method is a relative new nature-inspired algorithm. It searches solutions in the problem space by simulating the molecules movement happened during the chemical reaction process. This method has been applied to many problems in recent years. As a NP-hard combinatorial problem, nurse rostering problem (NPR) is a well-known personnel scheduling task whose goal is to create a nurse roster under many hard and soft constraints in a hospital ward. This paper investigates the application of CRO to solve the NRP. We provide the CRO operator under the framework for the rostering problem. The performance of the CRO method is evaluated on several datasets from the first NPR Competition 2010. Experiment results show that this method could obtain good solutions compared to that of genetic algorithm (implemented herein). Keywords Chemical reaction optimization personnel scheduling Genetic algorithm
Nurse rostering Timetabling and
422.1 Introduction Nurse rostering problem is a kind of personnel scheduling task which could be a difficult. In an hospital ward, managers or head nurses usually design the roster in a period by hand and this leads to a very time-consuming. Since this work often Z. Zheng (&) School of Management Science and Engineering, Shandong Normal University, Jinan, China e-mail: [email protected] X. Gong (&) Provincial Hospital Affliated to Shandong University, Jinan, China e-mail: [email protected]
S. Li et al. (eds.), Frontier and Future Development of Information Technology 3275 in Medicine and Education, Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering 269, DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-7618-0_422, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014
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Z. Zheng and X. Gong
needs the constraints, traditional method cannot obtain the best roster easily. Large amount of methods had been proposed to solve this method. Because this problem is NP-hard, various kinds of combinatorial optimization algorithms are investigate. To solve this problem, various kinds of method are proposed. In literature [1–4], population-based heuristics are provided. Chemical Reaction Optimization is first presented in [5]. It is an new nature-inspired searching technique framework. In this paper, we applied this relative new method to solve the NRP. In Sect. 432.2, we briefly describe the nurse rostering problem. In Sect. 422.3, we describe the CRO method and the operator we designed. Experiments are presented in Sect. 422.4, and draw the conclusion in the Sect. 422.5.
422.2 Problem Description The object of the nurse rostering problem is to create a roster dotted with shift types to present the nurse scheduling during a period. In our algorithm, one roster solution uses a multi-dimensional array to represent the solution directly. Usually two kinds of constraints should be considered, which are hard constraints and soft constraints. The definition of these constraints can be different based on the actu
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