ABSTRACT
Nurse scheduling is concerned with the assignment of work shifts and off days to nurses over a planning horizon of about 1 week to 1 month. This is the most common challenge in hospitals. The desire is to produce high-quality work schedules that satisfy (1) expectations of patients regarding quality of service, (2) nurse preferences such as workload, and (3) management goals. In the real world, these desires are usually conflicting, imprecise, and uncertain in a nonstochastic sense. As a result, developing high-quality nurse schedules is difficult in such a fuzzy environment. This decision problem situation is commonplace in healthcare organizations (Jan, Yamamoto, and Ohuchi, 2000; Topaloglu and Selim, 2010).
