Nurse Rostering is the activity of assigning nurses to daily shifts in order to satisfy the cover requirements, taking into account the operational requirements and nurses' preferences. The problem is usually modeled as sets of hard and soft constraints with an objective function to minimize violations of soft constraints. The nurse rostering problem is known to be NP-hard. Many metaheuristics were used to tackle this problem. One of the frequently used heuristics is the Variable Neighbourhood Search (VNS). The VNS is usually used as a standalone method or in integration with another exact or heuristic method. In this paper, a new hybrid VNS and Dynamic Programming based heuristic approach is proposed to handle the nurse rostering problem. In the proposed approach, two perturbation mechanisms are adopted simultaneously. The proposed approach is tested on two different benchmark data sets. A comparison with state-of-the-art methods from literature revealed the competitive performance of the proposed approach.

中文翻译：

---

护士排班问题的混合变量邻域搜索和动态规划方法

护士名册是指将护士安排到日常工作中以满足活动要求的活动，同时要考虑操作要求和护士的偏爱。通常将问题建模为具有目标函数的硬约束和软约束集合，以最大程度地减少对软约束的违反。护士排班问题已知是NP难的。许多元启发法被用来解决这个问题。常用的启发式方法之一是可变邻域搜索（VNS）。VNS通常用作独立方法或与另一种精确或启发式方法结合使用。本文提出了一种新的基于混合VNS和动态规划的启发式方法来解决护士排班问题。在提出的方法中，同时采用了两种摄动机制。在两种不同的基准数据集上测试了所提出的方法。与文献中的最新方法进行比较后，发现了该方法的竞争性能。