{"id":1096,"date":"2010-03-14T11:05:39","date_gmt":"2010-03-14T15:05:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/?p=1096"},"modified":"2010-03-14T11:05:39","modified_gmt":"2010-03-14T15:05:39","slug":"nurse-nurse-wheres-my-nurse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2010\/03\/14\/nurse-nurse-wheres-my-nurse\/","title":{"rendered":"Nurse, Nurse!  Where&#8217;s my Nurse?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I am a sucker for competitions.\u00a0 The people at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.asap.cs.nott.ac.uk\/patat\/patat-index.shtml\">PATAT<\/a> (a conference series Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling; I was co-chair for their 2004 conference, and a member of their steering committee for a few years) do a really good job at timetabling competitions.\u00a0 I really liked their <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.qub.ac.uk\/itc2007\/\">competition for the 2008 conference<\/a> on course and exam timetabling.\u00a0 I had some thoughts of using <a href=\"http:\/\/citeseerx.ist.psu.edu\/viewdoc\/summary?doi=10.1.1.55.1930\">logical Benders&#8217;<\/a> to solve one of the problems but didn&#8217;t quite get my act together for it.\u00a0 But I liked the problems and I liked the organization.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kuleuven-kortrijk.be\/nrpcompetition\">next competition has just begin<\/a>, though it is on an accelerated schedule.\u00a0 The topic is nurse rostering and ends June 1, 2010.\u00a0 This is an important practical problem:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Building good rosters for nurses in hospitals has received ample attention in recent years and is recognised as a difficult combinatorial optimisation problem with practical relevance. In hospitals much effort is spent producing solutions which are workable and of a high quality.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It is a nicely designed competition, but be aware that you can&#8217;t use commercial codes.\u00a0 So those of us who use CPLEX\/XPRESS\/Gurobi as a linear or integer programming base are probably out of luck:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<h3>Rule 5<\/h3>\n<p>Participants have to implement an algorithm to tackle the problem on a single processor machine; they can use any programming language. The use of third-party software is allowed under the following restrictions:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>it is free software<\/li>\n<li>it&#8217;s behaviour is (reasonably) documented<\/li>\n<li>it runs under a commonly-used operating system (Linux or Windows)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Working with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.coin-or.org\">COIN-OR<\/a> is probably legal, under a broad definition of &#8220;reasonably documented&#8221;.  But it is interesting that Mac operating systems are not deemed &#8220;commonly-used&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Despite these caveats, I do recommend the competition, and perhaps will see you in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.qub.ac.uk\/~B.McCollum\/patat10\/\">Belfast<\/a>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I am a sucker for competitions.\u00a0 The people at PATAT (a conference series Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling; I was co-chair for their 2004 conference, and a member of their steering committee for a few years) do a really good job at timetabling competitions.\u00a0 I really liked their competition for the 2008 conference on &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2010\/03\/14\/nurse-nurse-wheres-my-nurse\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Nurse, Nurse!  Where&#8217;s my Nurse?&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-challenges","category-conferences"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1096"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1096\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}