A Nurse Scheduling Support System with Nurse-in-Chief's Know-How

摘要

The authors have developed a nurse scheduling support system using Evolutionary Algorithm (EA). An actual nurse scheduling problem has many constraints, and it is very difficult to generate candidate schedules that satisfy all the constraints. In the field-testing, it has been found that it is effective to generate candidates easy for the nurse-in-chief to modify. She/he modifies the generated schedule with particular priorities on the constraints. This paper introduces an evaluation function with weighting factors for incorporating the nurse's priority. This paper also introduces an algorithm for generation of initial candidates of schedule for EA. Experiments are done to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.