The Gamut and Time Arrow of Automated Nurse Rostering

There is an undeniable global shortage of skillful nurses. This is a problem of high priority, which is correlated to workforce management issues. These issues can be palliated by increasing nurses' satisfaction based on flexible rosters using automated nurse rostering. This paper in concerned with nurse rostering based on constraint programming by satisfying global constraints, such as REGULAR, which is powerful but requires devising automata of acceptable states. It was proven that REGULAR is reformulatable to SLIDE. En route to reformulate a REGULAR-based into SLIDE-based solution to nurse rostering, and through elaboration of Minizinc implementation, the author of this paper proposes a couple of metaphors namely the gamut and time arrow to model the nurse rostering. A gamut is a whole-subset of objects, such as within a given color-space or by an output device. The time arrow may refer to the direction of time as comprehended in physics. The paper in hand elucidates the new formulation based on these two metaphors, and presents implementation in Minizinc.