Intelligent Clinic Nurse Scheduling Considering Nurses Paired with Doctors and Preference of Nurses.

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. The presented solution procedure is implemented in a real-world clinic, which is used as a case study. The developed scheduling technique reduced the time spent on scheduling by 93% and increased the satisfaction of the schedule by 21%, which further enhanced the operating efficiency and service quality.

Optimizing Living Material Delivery During the COVID-19 Outbreak.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic has spread worldwide, posing a great threat to human beings. The stay-home quarantine is an effective way to reduce physical contacts and the associated COVID-19 transmission risk, which requires the support of efficient living materials (such as meats, vegetables, grain, and oil) delivery. Notably, the presence of potential infected individuals increases the COVID-19 transmission risk during the delivery. The deliveryman may be the medium through which the virus spreads among urban residents. However, traditional delivery route optimization methods don't take the virus transmission risk into account. Here, we propose a novel living material delivery route approach considering the possible COVID-19 transmission during the delivery. A complex network-based virus transmission model is developed to simulate the possible COVID-19 infection between urban residents and the deliverymen. A bi-objective model considering the COVID-19 transmission risk and the total route length is proposed and solved by the hybrid meta-heuristics integrating the adaptive large neighborhood search and simulated annealing. The experiment was conducted in Wuhan, China to assess the performance of the proposed approach. The results demonstrate that 935 vehicles will totally travel 56,424.55 km to deliver necessary living materials to 3,154 neighborhoods, with total risk [Formula: see text]. The presented approach reduces the risk of COVID-19 transmission by 67.55% compared to traditional distance-based optimization methods. The presented approach can facilitate a well response to the COVID-19 in the transportation sector.

Economic load dispatch using memetic sine cosine algorithm.

In this paper, the economic load dispatch (ELD) problem which is an important problem in electrical engineering is tackled using a hybrid sine cosine algorithm (SCA) in a form of memetic technique. ELD is tackled by assigning a set of generation units with a minimum fuel costs to generate predefined load demand with accordance to a set of equality and inequality constraints. SCA is a recent population based optimizer turned towards the optimal solution using a mathematical-based model based on sine and cosine trigonometric functions. As other optimization methods, SCA has main shortcoming in exploitation process when a non-linear constraints problem like ELD is tackled. Therefore, ß -hill climbing optimizer, a recent local search algorithm, is hybridized as a new operator in SCA to empower its exploitation capability to tackle ELD. The proposed hybrid algorithm is abbreviated as SCA- ß HC which is evaluated using two sets of real-world generation cases: (i) 3-units, two versions of 13-units, and 40-units, with neglected Ramp Rate Limits and Prohibited Operating Zones constraints. (ii) 6-units and 15-units with Ramp Rate Limits and Prohibited Operating Zones constraints. The sensitivity analysis of the control parameters for SCA- ß HC is initially studied. The results show that the performance of the SCA- ß HC algorithm is increased by tuning its parameters in proper value. The comparative evaluation against several state-of-the-art methods show that the proposed method is able to produce new best results for some tested cases as well as the second-best for others. In a nutshell, hybridizing ß HC optimizer as a new operator for SCA is very powerful algorithm for tackling ELD problems.