The nurse scheduling problem (NSP) has been a crucial and challenging research issue for hospitals, especially considering the serious deterioration in nursing shortages in recent years owing to long working hours, considerable work pressure, and irregular lifestyle, which are important in the service industry. This study investigates the NSP that aims to maximize nurse satisfaction with the generated schedule subject to government laws, internal regulations of hospitals, doctor-nurse pairing rules, shift and day off preferences of nurses, etc. The computational experiment results show that our proposed hybrid metaheuristic outperforms other metaheuristics and manual scheduling in terms of both computation time and solution quality.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe prevention and control of nosocomial infection (NI) are becoming increasingly difficult, and its mechanism is becoming increasingly complex. A globally aging population means that an increasing proportion of patients have a susceptible constitution, and the frequent occurrence of severe infectious diseases has also led to an increase in the cost of prevention and control of NI. Medical buildings' spatial environment design for the prevention of NI has been a hot subject of considerable research, but few previous studies have summarized the design criteria for a medical building environment to control the risk of NI.
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