ABSTRACT
Healthcare task assignment in a hospital setting involves allocation of nursing care activities to nursing staff on a daily basis, subject to hard and soft constraints regarding relationships between tasks and capacity limitation of nurses (Paulussen et al., 2003; Vermeulen et al., 2006). The responsibility of nurses is to efficiently and effectively provide high-quality care to patients. However, due to a worldwide shortage of nurses and the ever-increasing pressure for high-quality nursing care, care task assignment is a crucial but difficult problem.
