Stefaan Haspeslagh

The first international nurse rostering competition 2010

Nurse rostering is a complex task of practical relevance. Over the last years, researchers have been able to solve increasingly larger and more complex problems. In this paper, we describe the full procedure of running the First International Nurse Rostering Competition. The aim of the competition was to develop further interest in the area and to stimulate new solution approaches by bringing together researchers from different areas.We describe the competition’s spirit and its rules, the problem description and evaluation of solutions. We also explain the selection process and the final results. In addition, we give a brief description of the algorithmic approaches undertaken by the participants. Finally, we discuss the lessons learned from the competition and future activities to undertake.

The Second International Nurse Rostering Competition

This paper reports on the Second International Nurse Rostering Competition (INRC-II). Its contributions are (1) a new problem formulation which, differently from INRC-I, is a multi-stage procedure, (2) a competition environment that, as in INRC-I, will continue to serve as a growing testbed for search approaches to the INRC-II problem, and (3) final results of the competition. We discuss also the competition environment, which is an infrastructure including problem and instance definitions, testbeds, validation/simulation tools and rules. The hardness of the competition instances has been evaluated through the behaviour of our own solvers, and confirmed by the solvers of the participants. Finally, we discuss general issues about both nurse rostering problems and optimisation competitions in general.