A nurse scheduling system for rerostering following a sudden absence of nurses

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A heuristic recursive search method for solving the nurse rerostering problems following a sudden absence of nurses is proposed in this research. Aiming at generating "feasible" schedules which satisfy some important conditions such as required numbers and skill levels of nurses at every-day-shifts, prohibited shift patterns and limits of workload for individual nurse, the proposed method solves the nurse rerostering problems by repeating a task re-assignment for filling up the absent position with an appropriate nurse and a 'day-off' task assignment for eliminating any violation of the feasible conditions in the current schedule in a recursive way. Numerical examples in 3-shift nurse rerostering problems with real data in Japan are shown to demonstrate that the proposed method can generate acceptable schedules for practical use efficiently.