The First International Nurse Rostering Competition

The First International Nurse Rostering Competition (INRC2010) was organized by the CODeS research group at KU Leuven (Belgium), SINTEF Group (Norway) and the University of Udine (Italy) and ran from March 2010 until June 2010. This competition sought to bridge the gap between academic research and practical application by bringing together researchers from various fields to develop innovative solutions for a challenging nurse rostering problem. A detailed description of the problem can be found here. Additional information about the competition can be found on this website

Instances

A zip file containing all instances can be downloaded here. XML schema descriptions of the input and solution format can be found here and here.

The competition organizers also provided an evaluator to check feasibilty of generated solutions and to compute their objective values. The evaluator can be downloaded here. To run the evaluator, use the following command: java -jar evaluator.jar [options] schedulingperiod.xml solution.xml The possible options are:

  • -h: prints help information about the use of the evaluator
  • -p: option only to print the value of the objective function without the violations per employee

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Ranking

For each track, the final ranking of the finalists is presented. The results take the best solutions for each instance (Early, Late and Hidden) into account. For the hidden instances we performed ten runs for the sprint and medium track instances and four runs for the long track instances.

Sprint track

  1. C. Valouxis, C. Gogos, G. Goulas, P. Alefragis, E. Housos
  2. K.Nonobe
  3. Zhipeng L. And Jin-Kao Hao
  4. E.K. Burke and T. Curtois
  5. B. Bilgin, P. Demeester, M. Misir, W. Vancroonenburg, G. Vanden Berghe, T. Wauters

Medium track

  1. C. Valouxis, C. Gogos, G. Goulas, P. Alefragis, E. Housos
  2. E.K. Burke and T. Curtois
  3. K.Nonobe
  4. Zhipeng L. And Jin-Kao Hao
  5. B. Bilgin, P. Demeester, M. Misir, W. Vancroonenburg, G. Vanden Berghe, T. Wauters

Long track

  1. C. Valouxis, C. Gogos, G. Goulas, P. Alefragis, E. Housos
  2. E.K. Burke and T. Curtois
  3. B. Bilgin, P. Demeester, M. Misir, W. Vancroonenburg, G. Vanden Berghe, T. Wauters
  4. K. Nonobe
  5. D. Rizzato, A. Constantino, E. Luiz de Melo, D. Landa-Silva, W. Roméo