The Second International Nurse Rostering Competition introduced the concept of stages and required the competitors to solve a sequence of cases referring to consecutive weeks of the planning horizon.

The problem was defined by a scenario, a set of weeks and an initial history description. Problems had to be solved covering the full scenario of 4 or 8 consecutive weeks, in stages of 1 week at the time. After each stage, the information for the next stage became available. As resources were taken up at any stage, forecasting may have been required in order to cope well with coming stages. The forecasting could be based on data from previous weeks.

More information about the competition can be found on this website.