Dynamic programming with approximation function for nurse scheduling

Although dynamic programming could ideally solve any combinatorial optimization problem, the curse of dimensionality of the search space seriously limits its application to large optimization problems. For example, only few papers in the literature have reported the application of dynamic programmin...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Shi, Peng, Landa-Silva, Dario
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Springer Verlag 2016
Subjects:
Online Access:https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/35585/
Description
Summary:Although dynamic programming could ideally solve any combinatorial optimization problem, the curse of dimensionality of the search space seriously limits its application to large optimization problems. For example, only few papers in the literature have reported the application of dynamic programming to workforce scheduling problems. This paper investigates approximate dynamic programming to tackle nurse scheduling problems of size that dynamic programming cannot tackle in practice. Nurse scheduling is one of the problems within workforce scheduling that has been tackled with a considerable number of algorithms particularly meta-heuristics. Experimental results indicate that approximate dynamic programming is a suitable method to solve this problem effectively.