The Nurse Scheduling problem (NSP) is a combinatorial problem that consists of assigning nurses to shifts according to given practical constraints. In previous years, several approaches have been proposed to solve different variants of the NSP. In this paper, an ASP encoding for one of these variants is presented, whose requirements have been provided by an Italian hospital. We also design a second encoding for the computation of “optimal” schedules. Finally, an experimental analysis has been conducted on real data provided by the Italian hospital using both encodings. Results are very positive: the state-of-the-art ASP system clingo is able to compute one year schedules in few minutes, and it scales well even when more than one hundred nurses are considered.
Nurse scheduling via answer set programming
Dodaro C.;Maratea M.
2017-01-01
Abstract
The Nurse Scheduling problem (NSP) is a combinatorial problem that consists of assigning nurses to shifts according to given practical constraints. In previous years, several approaches have been proposed to solve different variants of the NSP. In this paper, an ASP encoding for one of these variants is presented, whose requirements have been provided by an Italian hospital. We also design a second encoding for the computation of “optimal” schedules. Finally, an experimental analysis has been conducted on real data provided by the Italian hospital using both encodings. Results are very positive: the state-of-the-art ASP system clingo is able to compute one year schedules in few minutes, and it scales well even when more than one hundred nurses are considered.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
