A proposal of combined method of evolutionary algorithm and heuristics for nurse scheduling support system

The nurse scheduling problem (NSP) is a combinatorial optimization problem. There is a growing demand for practical automatic nurse scheduling systems. We have a developed a nurse scheduling support system using the interactive evolutionary algorithm. The nurse-in-chief can modify/fix parts of candidate schedules. The system reschedules the parts that need improvement. The proposed system is required to produce high-quality schedules with a short computation time for good human-machine interaction. This paper presents a method that combines heuristics with genetic operations for generating good schedules quickly, especially for satisfying the equality among nurses. This paper clarifies the effects of the proposed heuristics and also studies effects of a combination of the proposed method and the conventional mutation operation. Experiments are conducted to demonstrate these effects.