1. By Simon Martin, Dr Djamila Ouelhadj Logistics and Management Mathematics Group, Department of Mathematics University of Portsmouth Lion Gate Portsmouth PO1 3HE England +44 (0) 23 9284 6393 simon.martin@port.ac.uk A generic agent-based framework for fairness in Nurse rostering

2. The Aims of this project To use our agent based framework to solve the Nurse Rostering Problem To use cooperation to automatically find the best combination of heuristics/meta heuristics and parameters that best solves this problem.

3. The Nurse Rostering problem There are different staffing needs on different days and shifts Staff work in shifts Healthcare institutions work around the clock The need for day and night shifts The correct staff mix for each ward Many different employment contracts Part-time Special arrangements Fairness so that staff are happy The Scheduling of hospital personnel is Particularly challenging because:

4. Until recently this was all done by hand by a senior nurse and it took a significant amount of time each week! Recently computer systems have been built to help solve this problem. However the problem is not always solvable in a sensible time-scale This is known as NP-Hard. To tackle these issues we use techniques called heuristics Its hard, NP- HARD!

5. The Current Platform Problem definition Launcher Agent Cooperating Agent The Launcher Agent (LA) sends the same problem to each agent

6. The Current Platform Launcher Agent Cooperating Agent Agents cooperate by passing Best heuristics/edges

7. The Current Platform Problem definition Launcher Agent Cooperating Agent Each agent sends its best overall solution to the launcher agent. The LA takes the best And writes it to file

8. The Collaborators The project will be conducted by: Dr Djamila Ouelhadj LMMG University of Portsmouth Simon Martin LMMG University of Portsmouth Dr Ender Özcan of The Automated Scheduling, Optimisation and Planning (ASAP) research group University of Nottingham Dr Greet Vanden Berghe KAHO Sint-Lieven Belgium

9. Conclusions and Future Work We will use agents to develop fair and optimal nurse employment schedules. We will use cooperating agents to obtain these rosters Make a significant contribution to the field such that it can be used in future projects to develop a working system