Nurse rostering

Bc. Šimon Tóth

Master's thesis

Abstract:

Nurse rostering, a well known NP complete problem, consists of assigning nurses to shifts under given regulations. The goal is to produce a roster satisfying all hard constraints and as many soft constraints as possible. This problem has occupied the researchers since early 70's and is still being intensively researched. Latest results concentrate on real life problems and contain a considerable amount of problem dependent knowledge. This leads to hard incorporation of these results into other problems. Hospitals in the Czech Republic still rely upon manual rostering done by head nurses. This is both lengthy and difficult task. While the foreign problems tend to build upon the same base, the problem at Kyjov hospital is rather different. Most of the requirements are enforced by the law and therefore cannot be violated. To find solution for this problem a genetic algorithm will be presented. This heuristic method will be used to solve one particular instance of the Kyjov hospital problem and will be also tested on the ANROM problem available from Personnel Scheduling Data Sets and Benchmarks at University of Nottingham (http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~tec/NRP/).

Keywords

nurse rostering, genetic algorithms, heuristics, rostering

Language used: English

Date on which the thesis was submitted / produced: 23. 5. 2008

Thesis defence

• Date of defence: 3. 7. 2008
• Supervisor: doc. Mgr. Hana Rudová, Ph.D.
• Reader: prof. RNDr. Ivana Černá, CSc.

Masaryk University

Faculty of Informatics

Master programme / field:
Applied Informatics / Applied Informatics