One of the key challenges of nurse scheduling problem (NSP) is the number of
constraints placed on preparing the timetable, both from the regulatory
requirements as well as the patients' demand for the appropriate nursing care
specialists. In addition, the preferences of the nursing staffs related to
their work schedules add another dimension of complexity. Most solutions
proposed for solving nurse scheduling involve the use of mathematical
programming and generally considers only the hard constraints. However, the
psychological needs of the nurses are ignored and this resulted in subsequent
interventions by the nursing staffs to remedy any deficiency and often results
in last minute changes to the schedule. In this paper, we present a staff
preference optimization framework which is solved with a greedy double swap
heuristic. The heuristic yields good performance in speed at solving the
problem. The heuristic is simple and we will demonstrate its performance by
implementing it on open source spreadsheet software
