Abstract
The assignment of care tasks to nurses is often done manually in most hospitals. A high quality care task schedule is crucial for efficient and effective execution of nursing care duties. High quality schedules seek to satisfy patient preferences over time window for the care, schedule fairness among nurses, and management goals regarding care activity completion times and labor costs. This paper suggests a grouping genetic approach to care task scheduling in a hospital setting. By taking advantage of the group structure of the problem, the algorithm uses fuzzy evaluation techniques, permuting tasks across candidate nurse schedules and within each nurse schedule. Results of the computational experiments show that the proposed approach is effective.