Guided complete search for nurse rostering problems

Nurse rostering problem is one of the most difficult scheduling problems in artificial intelligence and operation research. In general, it consists of cardinality constraints and special pattern constraints that correspond to the given workforce demands, which form a complex problem structure. Many heuristics algorithms have been proposed to solve this particular problem. In this paper, we demonstrate the efficiency of our newly defined GCS/simplex solver, which incorporates simplex method into the GCS framework, on some difficult nurse rostering problem instances. Experimental results show that the GCS/Simplex solver is efficient in solving this kind of scheduling problems in terms of both computation time and number of fails.