Scheduling using tabu search methods with intensification and diversification

After spending five years in Medical School, physician students have to complete additional study including several interships before becoming full members of their professional guild. In this paper, we deal with the annual scheduling of internships taking into account the supervision capacities of the hospitals. The problem is modeled as an assignment-type problem. Several variants of Tabu Search procedures including intensification and diversification strategies are proposed and tested to deal with this problem. The numerical results indicate that the solution quality can be improved using intensification and diversification, at the expense of increasing solution time.Scope and purposeAfter spending five years in Medical School, future physicians have to complete additional study including several internships before becoming full members of their professional guild. The number of internships to be completed, their subject area, and their length depend on the student specialization. In this paper, we analyze the problem faced by the medical school each year to specify the schedule for each student's internships. For each of his internships, a student specifies preferences about its time period and the location. The objective function is to maximize the overall satisfaction of the students. The constraints correspond to the bounds (lower and upper) on the number of students that the hospitals are ready to supervise for each type of internships and for each period of the year. The problem is formulated as an assignment-type problem. To deal with this problem, we propose several variants of local search heuristic procedures including strategies to intensify the search in specific region of the feasible domain (intensification), and others to search the whole feasible domain more extensively (diversification). These variants are tested and compared to establish the tradeoff between solution time and solution quality.