Hybrid Swarm-Based Optimization Algorithm of GA & VNS for Nurse Scheduling Problem

This paper presents a hybrid swarm-based optimization algorithm that combines genetic algorithm (GA) and variable neighborhood search (VNS) to deal with highly-constrained nurse scheduling problems in modern hospital environments. The problem is first divided into several sub-problems by the average principle. Then a genetic algorithm is used to solve the sub-problems including a subset of constraints. Better feasible solutions are built by a hybrid genetic algorithm; they are taken as the initial solution of the variable neighborhood search procedure. The proposed algorithm can be applied to other resource allocation problems with a large number of constraints. The experiment results show that our method can produce feasible solutions.

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