@inbook{b2ac9bf30b364806a92e1d0f8e029821,
title = "A hybrid AI approach to staff scheduling",
abstract = "Assigning nursing staff to specific duties according to their contract, qualifications, skills, etc. within a working environment characterised by multi-disciplinarity and statutory regulations is problematic. Factors involved in making effective assignments include individual and corporate procedures, guidelines and constraints. Manual rostering commonly proceeds through a process of reasoning in which a number of consecutive stages occur to progressively refine and repair the work schedule. This paper discusses an approach to nurse rostering, using a strategy of distributing the computational effort required in the scheduling process. The technique involves a hybrid approach that devolves responsibility for different aspects of the problem to a heuristic component and a constraint solver. In the pre-processing stage, the staff to be rostered are treated as semi-autonomous agents, each with individual responsibility for their initial assignment, and communicating with a global constraint satisfaction agent. This has proved to be intuitive to build and effective in use.",
author = "Graham Winstanley",
year = "2003",
language = "English",
isbn = "1852336749",
series = "BCS conference series",
publisher = "Springer-Verlag",
pages = "367--380",
editor = "M. Bramer and A. Preece and F. Coenen",
booktitle = "Research and development in intelligent systems XIX: proceedings of the 22nd SGAI international conference on knowledge based systems and applied artificial intelligence, Cambridge, UK, December 2002",
}