A Collaborative Approach to Solve a Nurse Scheduling Problem

In this paper we present a collaborative approach designed to solve a real world problem: the Nurse Scheduling Problem (NSP) at a Chilean hospital. Nurses represent the main shared resources in the hospital. In this paper, we attempt to find a fair/balanced schedule for them, considering a set of constraints and each nurse preferences concerning the different shifts. We propose a collaborative framework in order to manage two objectives: To maximize the nurses preferences and to minimize unfairness assignments. We use real-world instances of the problem for testing, the results show that our collaboration technique is a very effective one in terms of the CPU time and the quality of the solution found.