Parallel processing of cooperative genetic algorithm for nurse scheduling

Abstract

This paper proposes an effective parallel algorithm for the cooperative genetic algorithm (CGA) to solve a nurse scheduling problem. The nurse scheduling is very complex task for a clinical director in a general hospital. Even veteran director needs one or two weeks to create the schedule. Besides, we extend the nurse schedule to permit the change of the schedule. This permission has explosively increased computation time for the nurse scheduling. We propose the new parallel algorithm to solve the problem. The parallel CGA has brought surprising effective results.