Comparison and hybridization of crossover operators for the nurse scheduling problem

In this paper, we present a hybrid genetic algorithm for the well-known nurse scheduling problem (NSP). The NSP involves the construction of roster schedules for nursing staff in order to maximize the quality of the roster schedule subject to various hard constraints. In the literature, several genetic algorithms have been proposed to solve the NSP under various assumptions. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we extensively compare the various crossover operators and test them on a standard dataset in a solitary approach. Second, we propose several options to hybridize the various crossover operators.