Hyper-heuristic approach for solving nurse rostering problem

Abstract

Hyper-heuristic (HH) is a higher level heuristic to choose from a set of heuristics applicable for the problem on hand. In this paper, a Harmony Search-based Hyper-heuristic (HSHH) approach is tested in solving nurse rostering problems (NRP). NRP is a complex scheduling problem of assigning given shifts to a given nurses. We test the proposed method by using the First International Nurse Rostering Competition 2010 (INRC2010) dataset. Experimentally, the HSHH approach achieved comparable results with the comparative methods in the literature.