Solving nurse rostering problem using artificial bee colony algorithm

Artificial bee colony algorithm(ABC) is proposed as a new nature-inspired algorithm which has been successfully utilized to tackle numerous class of optimization problems belongs to the category of swarm intelligence optimization algorithms. The major focus of this paper is to show that ABC could be used to generate good solutions when adapted to tackle the nurse rostering problem (NRP). In the proposed ABC for the NRP, the solution methods is divided into two phases. The first uses a heuristic ordering strategy to generate feasible solutions while the second phase employs the usage of ABC algorithm in which its operators are utilized to enhance the feasible solutions to their optimality. The proposed algorithm is tested on a set of 69 problem instances of the dataset introduced by the First International Nurse Rostering Competition 2010 (INRC2010). The results produced by the proposed algorithm are very promising when compared with some existing techniques that worked on the same dataset. Further investigation is still necessary for further improvement of the proposed algorithm.