AN ARTIFICIAL BEE COLONY ALGORITHM FOR SOLVING NURSE SCHEDULING PROBLEMS

The nurse scheduling problems (NSP) deal with assignment of the nurse to the specific shifts in specific days is taking into account both the hospital's need and nurse preference. In the hospitals, nurses are serving under difficult circumstances. To improve the quality of service, work schedules should be prepared in a fair manner and has to provide the desired conditions. In this study, it is aimed at developing a model which can be used in real applications and can be rapidly reached to the solution for the nurse scheduling problem. For this purpose, the formulated problem was solved by using artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm, which is one of the new meta-heuristic methods. It has been coded a program with a user interface using the Visual Studio programming language for running the model. The designed interface is able to take into account the different level of the demand and the number of staff. The model was tested on a real problem and found better solution than the current situation.