scholarly journals Ant colony optimization with semi random initialization for nurse rostering problem

Author(s):  
Said Achmad ◽  
Antoni Wibowo ◽  
Diana Diana

A nurse rostering problem is an NP-Hard problem that is difficult to solve during the complexity of the problem. Since good scheduling is the schedule that fulfilled the hard constraint and minimizes the violation of soft constraint, a lot of approaches is implemented to improve the quality of the schedule. This research proposed an improvement on ant colony optimization with semi-random initialization for nurse rostering problems. Semi-random initialization is applied to avoid violation of the hard constraint, and then the violation of soft constraint will be minimized using ant colony optimization. Semi-random initialization will improve the construction solution phase by assigning nurses directly to the shift that is related to the hard constraint, so the violation of hard constraint will be avoided from the beginning part. The scheduling process will complete by pheromone value by giving weight to the rest available shift during the ant colony optimization process. This proposed method is tested using a real-world problem taken from St. General Hospital Elisabeth. The objective function is formulated to minimize the violation of the constraints and balance nurse workload. The performance of the proposed method is examined by using different dimension problems, with the same number of ant and iteration. The proposed method is also compared to conventional ant colony optimization and genetic algorithm for performance comparison. The experiment result shows that the proposed method performs better with small to medium dimension problems. The semi-random initialization is a success to avoid violation of the hard constraint and minimize the objective value by about 24%. The proposed method gets the lowest objective value with 0,76 compared to conventional ant colony optimization with 124 and genetic algorithm with 1.

Author(s):  
Razamin Ramli ◽  
Rosshairy Abd Rahman ◽  
Nurdalila Rohim

Distribution of work shifts and off days to nurses in a duty roster is a crucial task. In hospital wards, much effort is spent trying to produce workable and quality rosters for their nurses. However, there are cases, such as mandatory working days per week and balanced distribution of shift types that could not be achieved in the manually generated rosters, which are still being practiced. Hence, this study focused on solving those issues arising in nurse rostering problems (NRPs) strategizing on a hybrid of Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm with a hill climbing technique. The hybridization with the hill climbing is aiming at fine-tuning the initial solution or roster generated by the ACO algorithm to achieve better rosters. The hybrid model is developed with the goal of satisfying the hard constraints, while minimizing the violation of soft constraints in such a way that fulfill hospital’s rules and nurses’ preferences. The real data used for this highly constrained NRPs was obtained from a large Malaysian hospital. Specifically, three main phases were involved in developing the hybrid model, which are generating an initial roster, updating the roster through the ACO algorithm, and implementing the hill climbing to further search for a refined solution. The results show that at a larger value of pheromone, the chance of obtaining a good solution was found with only small penalty values. This study has proven that the hybrid ACO is able to solve NRPs with good potential solutions that fulfilled all the four important criteria, which are coverage, quality, flexibility, and cost. Subsequently, the hybridmodel is also beneficial to the hospital’s management whereby nurses can be scheduled with balanced distribution of shifts, which fulfil their preferences as well.  


2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (11) ◽  
pp. 6399-6412 ◽  
Author(s):  
Menad Nait Amar ◽  
Nourddine Zeraibi ◽  
Kheireddine Redouane

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