Hybridization of harmony search with hill climbing for highly constrained nurse rostering problem

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• 作者：Mohammed A. Awadallah ; Mohammed Azmi Al-Betar…
• 关键词：Metaheuristic ; Harmony search ; Nurse rostering ; Hill climbing ; Particle swarm optimization
• 刊名：Neural Computing and Applications
• 出版年：2017
• 出版时间：March 2017
• 年：2017
• 卷：28
• 期：3
• 页码：463-482
• 全文大小：
• 刊物类别：Computer Science
• 刊物主题：Artificial Intelligence (incl. Robotics); Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery; Probability and Statistics in Computer Science; Computational Science and Engineering; Image Processing and Computer Visi
• 出版者：Springer London
• ISSN：1433-3058
• 卷排序：28

文摘

This paper proposes a hybrid harmony search algorithm (HHSA) for solving the highly constrained nurse rostering problem (NRP). The NRP is a combinatorial optimization problem tackled by assigning a set of shifts to a set of nurses; each has specific skills and work contract, to a predefined rostering period according to a set of constraints. The harmony search is a metaheuristic approach, where the metaheuristics are the most successful methods for tackling this problem. In HHSA, the harmony search algorithm is hybridized with the hill climbing optimizer to empower its exploitation capability. Furthermore, the memory consideration operator of the HHSA is modified by replacing the random selection scheme with the global-best concept of particle swarm optimization to accelerate its convergence rate. The standard dataset published in the first international nurse rostering competition 2010 (INRC2010) was utilized to evaluate the proposed HHSA. Several convergence scenarios have been employed to study the effects of the two HHSA modifications. Finally, a comparative evaluation against twelve other methods that worked on the INRC2010 dataset is carried out. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieved five new best results, and 33 best published results out of 69 instances as achieved by other comparative methods.