5f05ca25_on_and_Planning_Research_Group__Description
[Research Theme] Personnel Scheduling. [Description] 
Personnel scheduling problems are found in a wide variety of environments. Some of the most complex and challenging problems arise in hospitals and healthcare centres, for example nurse and physician rostering. The benefits of automating the rostering process in these situations include reducing the planner's workload and associated costs and being able to create higher quality and more flexible schedules. This has become more important recently in order to retain nurses and attract more people into the profession. Better quality rosters also reduce fatigue and stress due to overwork and poor scheduling and help to maximise the use of leisure time by satisfying more requests. A more contented workforce leads to higher productivity, increased quality of patient service and a better level of healthcare. The ASAP group has developed a number of novel and very effective rostering algorithms in real world scenarios. These approaches include tabu search, variable neighbourhood search, memetic algorithms, case-based reasoning, hyperheuristics, hybrid methods and many others. In order to scientifically test and validate these algorithms we have created a suite of highly challenging benchmark data sets from a number of hospitals around the world. These data sets are publicly available at http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~tec/NRP/. This collection is the only source of a wide range of real world nurse rostering benchmark instances and a valuable asset of the personnel scheduling community.
Research Themes | Automated Scheduling, Optimisation and Planning Research Group
Description