An indirect Genetic Algorithm for a nurse-scheduling problem

An indirect Genetic Algorithm for a nurse-scheduling problem

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Article ID: iaor20043184
Country: United Kingdom
Volume: 31
Issue: 5
Start Page Number: 761
End Page Number: 778
Publication Date: Apr 2004
Journal: Computers and Operations Research
Authors: ,
Keywords: personnel & manpower planning, heuristics
Abstract:

This paper describes a Genetic Algorithms (GAs) approach to a manpower-scheduling problem arising at a major UK hospital. Although GAs have been successfully used for similar problems in the past, they always had to overcome the limitations of the classical GAs paradigm in handling the conflict between objectives and constraints. The approach taken here is to use an indirect coding based on permutations of the nurses, and a heuristic decoder that builds schedules from these permutations. Computational experiments based on 52 weeks of live data are used to evaluate three different decoders with varying levels of intelligence, and four well-known crossover operators. Results are further enhanced by introducing a hybrid crossover operator and by making use of simple bounds to reduce the size of the solution space. The results reveal that the proposed algorithm is able to find high quality solutions and is both faster and more flexible than a recently published Tabu search approach.

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