One of the key challenges of nurse scheduling problem (NSP) is the number ofconstraints placed on preparing the timetable, both from the regulatoryrequirements as well as the patients' demand for the appropriate nursing carespecialists. In addition, the preferences of the nursing staffs related totheir work schedules add another dimension of complexity. Most solutionsproposed for solving nurse scheduling involve the use of mathematicalprogramming and generally considers only the hard constraints. However, thepsychological needs of the nurses are ignored and this resulted in subsequentinterventions by the nursing staffs to remedy any deficiency and often resultsin last minute changes to the schedule. In this paper, we present a staffpreference optimization framework which is solved with a greedy double swapheuristic. The heuristic yields good performance in speed at solving theproblem. The heuristic is simple and we will demonstrate its performance byimplementing it on open source spreadsheet software.
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