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The nurse scheduling problem is a critical optimization challenge in healthcare management. It aims to balance staffing demands, nurse satisfaction, and patient care quality. Corresponding to the constraints inherent in this scheduling…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-27 Matthew M. Lin , Yu-Chen Shu , Bing-Ze Lu , Pei-Shan Fang

Nurse staffing and scheduling are persistent challenges in healthcare due to demand fluctuations and individual nurse preferences. This study introduces the concept of bounded flexibility, balancing nurse satisfaction with strict rostering…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-02 Si Zhang , Paul Mingzheng Tang , Hoong Chuin Lau

Scheduling problems are generally NP-hard combinatorial problems, and a lot of research has been done to solve these problems heuristically. However, most of the previous approaches are problem-specific and research into the development of…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2010-07-05 Jingpeng Li , Uwe Aickelin

Machine learning has increasingly been employed to solve NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems, resulting in the emergence of neural solvers that demonstrate remarkable performance, even with minimal domain-specific knowledge. To…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-27 Chengrui Gao , Haopu Shang , Ke Xue , Chao Qian

While deep learning techniques have become extremely popular for solving a broad range of optimization problems, methods to enforce hard constraints during optimization, particularly on deep neural networks, remain underdeveloped. Inspired…

Many problems in operations research require that constraints be specified in the model. Determining the right constraints is a hard and laborsome task. We propose an approach to automate this process using artificial intelligence and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-05-30 Mohit Kumar , Stefano Teso , Luc De Raedt

Optimizing schedules in real-world settings often requires considering workload constraints, specially for human resources, to ensure regulatory compliance, impose rest periods, or level the workload over the working horizon. This paper…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-21 Tanguy Terrien , Cyrille Briand

Scheduling problems are a fundamental class of combinatorial optimization problems that underpin operational efficiency in manufacturing, logistics, and service systems. While operations research has traditionally developed solver-centric…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-03 Anbang Liu , Shaochong Lin , Jingchuan Chen , Peng Wu , Zuojun Max Shen

The manpower scheduling problem is a kind of critical combinational optimization problem. Researching solutions to scheduling problems can improve the efficiency of companies, hospitals, and other work units. This paper proposes a new model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-11 Tianyu Liu , Lingyu Zhang

Recently, message-passing graph neural networks (MPNNs) have shown potential for solving combinatorial and continuous optimization problems due to their ability to capture variable-constraint interactions. While existing approaches leverage…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-05 Chendi Qian , Christopher Morris

The personnel scheduling problem is a well-known NP-hard combinatorial problem. Due to the complexity of this problem and the size of the real-world instances, it is not possible to use exact methods, and thus heuristics, meta-heuristics,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-05-22 Roman Václavík , Přemysl Šůcha , Zdeněk Hanzálek

Finding actions that satisfy the constraints imposed by both external inputs and internal representations is central to decision making. We demonstrate that some important classes of constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) can be solved by…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2018-01-16 Ueli Rutishauser , Jean-Jacques Slotine , Rodney J. Douglas

Increasing interest in integrating advanced robotics within manufacturing has spurred a renewed concentration in developing real-time scheduling solutions to coordinate human-robot collaboration in this environment. Traditionally, the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Zheyuan Wang , Matthew Gombolay

In all but the most trivial optimization problems, the structure of the solutions exhibit complex interdependencies between the input parameters. Decades of research with stochastic search techniques has shown the benefit of explicitly…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2017-03-23 Shumeet Baluja

This paper presents a framework to tackle constrained combinatorial optimization problems using deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). To this end, we extend the Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) theory in order to deal with constraints in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Ruben Solozabal , Josu Ceberio , Martin Takáč

In this paper, we develop a unified machine learning (ML) approach to predict high-quality solutions for single-machine scheduling problems with a non-decreasing min-sum objective function with or without release times. Our ML approach is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-01-09 Anbang Liu , Zhi-Long Chen , Jinyang Jiang , Xi Chen

Constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) consist of a set of variables taking values from some finite domain and a set of local constraints on these variables. The objective is to find an assignment to the variables that maximizes the…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Amey Bhangale , Yezhou Zhang

Backtracking search algorithms are often used to solve the Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP). The efficiency of backtracking search depends greatly on the variable ordering heuristics. Currently, the most commonly used heuristics are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-12-28 Wen Song , Zhiguang Cao , Jie Zhang , Andrew Lim

We build on a recently proposed method for stepwise explaining solutions of Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSP) in a human-understandable way. An explanation here is a sequence of simple inference steps where simplicity is quantified…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-11-29 Emilio Gamba , Bart Bogaerts , Tias Guns

In this paper, we investigate the hybridization of constraint programming and local search techniques within a large neighbourhood search scheme for solving highly constrained nurse rostering problems. As identified by the research, a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2009-10-08 Fang He , Rong Qu