A Component Based Heuristic Search Method with Evolutionary Eliminations

27 Pages Posted: 16 Aug 2016

See all articles by Jingpeng Li

Jingpeng Li

University of Nottingham

Uwe Aickelin

University of Melbourne - School of Computing and Information Systems

Edmund Burke

University of Nottingham

Date Written: January 1, 2008

Abstract

Nurse rostering is a complex scheduling problem that affects hospital personnel on a daily basis all over the world. This paper presents a new component-based approach with evolutionary eliminations, for a nurse scheduling problem arising at a major UK hospital. The main idea behind this technique is to decompose a schedule into its components (i.e. the allocated shift pattern of each nurse), and then to implement two evolutionary elimination strategies mimicking natural selection and natural mutation process on these components respectively to iteratively deliver better schedules. The worthiness of all components in the schedule has to be continuously demonstrated in order for them to remain there. This demonstration employs an evaluation function which evaluates how well each component contributes towards the final objective. Two elimination steps are then applied: the first elimination eliminates a number of components that are deemed not worthy to stay in the current schedule; the second elimination may also throw out, with a low level of probability, some worthy components. The eliminated components are replenished with new ones using a set of constructive heuristics using local optimality criteria. Computational results using 52 data instances demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach in solving real-world problems.

Keywords: nurse rostering, constructive heuristic, local search, evolutionary elimination

Suggested Citation

Li, Jingpeng and Aickelin, Uwe and Burke, Edmund, A Component Based Heuristic Search Method with Evolutionary Eliminations (January 1, 2008). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2823399 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2823399

Jingpeng Li

University of Nottingham ( email )

University Park
Nottingham, NG8 1BB
United Kingdom

Uwe Aickelin (Contact Author)

University of Melbourne - School of Computing and Information Systems ( email )

Australia

Edmund Burke

University of Nottingham ( email )

University Park
Nottingham, NG8 1BB
United Kingdom

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