Memetic search for composing medical crews with equity and efficiency

Abstract Composing medical crews with equity and efficiency is an important practical problem commonly arising from health care system management. This work presents the first hybrid memetic algorithm for this problem. The proposed approach integrates an original backbone-based crossover for generating promising offspring solutions and a tabu search based local optimization algorithm exploring both feasible and infeasible search regions. Computational experiments on two sets of benchmark instances in the literature are conducted to assess the proposed algorithm with reference to existing methods. This study advances the state-of-the-art of solving this relevant practical problem and is expected to inspire new solution methods to similar problems.