SOLVING ROSTERING TASKS BY GENERIC METHODS FOR CONSTRAINT OPTIMIZATION
Harald Meyer · International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science · 2001
Based on experiences with the ORBIS·Dienstplan-system, this paper described how constraint processing can be used to implement automatic rostering systems. In practice, nurse rostering problems have many varying parameters. Hence, rostering requires a flexible formalism for representing the variants of the problem as well as a robust search procedure that is able to cope with all problem instances. On the one hand, the used constraint formalism allows the integration of very fine-grained optimization tasks by fuzzy constraints, which a roster may partially satisfy and partially violate. On the other hand, the described system uses an any-time algorithm to search good rosters. A meta-problem is generated from the constraint representation of the problem to identify reasons for constraint violations in order to improve the search for improvement steps.