File Entry: Intelligent Hybrid Algorithm using Constraint-Based Reasoning and Genetic Algorithm for Nurse Scheduling.

 Almost all hospital has its own nurses and still use the old fashion manual way of managing nurse scheduling in daily business. Nurse scheduling problem represents a difficult class of multi-objective optimisation problems consisting of a number of interfering objectives between the hospitals and individual nurses. Nurse scheduling consists of assignment of shifts and holidays to nurses for each day on the time horizon, taking into consideration a variety of conflicting interests or objectives between the hospitals and individual nurses. Nurse scheduling can be modeled as a shift/rotation schedule that can be solved by several methods. The nurse scheduling has been solved by various methods like genetic algorithm, constraint logic programming, evolutionary algorithms, neighbourhood function, backtracking algorithms and lookahead algorithms. In this research the hybrid or combination of genetic algorithm with constraint-based reasoning are used for solving this scheduling problems. The constraint-based reasoning is used to prune the search space meanwhile, genetic algorithm is used for searching the solution in the search space. The proposed method is tested using data from Hospital Permai, Johor. The experimental results show that the hybrid technique has been proven to solve this problem effectively.