For info on INRC-II, please visit The Second International Nurse Rostering Competition (http://mobiz.vives.be/inrc2)
The overall orderings and winners of each track will be announced at PATAT 2010. In a special session, competitors can present their results and techniques. Submissions for this session are allowed up until the end of July.
Building on the success of the two timetabling competitions, this competition on the nurse rostering problem aims to further develop interest in the general area of rostering and timetabling while providing researchers with models of the problems faced which incorporate an increased number of real world constraints.
Building good rosters for nurses in hospitals has received ample attention in recent years and is recognised as a difficult combinatorial optimisation problem with practical relevance. In hospitals much effort is spent producing solutions which are workable and of a high quality.
An important aim of this competition is to generate new approaches to the associated problems by attracting users from all areas of research. As with many cases in the past, significant advancements have been made in research areas by attracting multi-disciplinary approaches.
The second important aim is to close the gap which currently exists between research and practice within this important area of operational research. Although for the sake of the competitive element, we do not include all aspects of the ‘real world’ problem, we do build on the recent developments to introduce significantly more depth and complexity.
A third aim of the competition is to further stimulate debate within the widening rostering and timetabling research community.
The competition is composed of three tracks, called after the Olympic disciplines sprint, middle distance running and long distance running. These tracks represent distinct problem settings in practice and algorithm performance is often tuned to the available running time. The organisers do welcome researchers to trial their techniques on more than one track. The winner of each track receives a prize of €535 and free registration to PATAT in Belfast 2010.
The winner will be chosen based on effectiveness of a particular technique in a specified time.
Competitors will be invited to present on their submission in a special session at PATAT 2010 in Belfast and to submit a paper to the selected papers post conference special issue of Annals of Operational Research.
The Competition is organised and run by the CODeS research group at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, SINTEF Group in Norway and the University of Udine in Italy.
More information about the competition can be found in this document.
If you have any queries or comments regarding the competition please contact us…