A constraint programming approach to the hospitals/residents problem

Manlove, D.F., O'Malley, G., Prosser, P. and Unsworth, C. (2007) A constraint programming approach to the hospitals/residents problem. In: Proceedings of CP-AI-OR '07: the Fourth International Conference on Integration of AI and OR Techniques in Constraint Programming for Combinatorial Optimization Problems, Brussels, Belgium, 23-26 May, 2007, pp. 155-170. (doi: 10.1007/978-3-540-72397-4_12)

Abstract

An instance I of the Hospitals/Residents problem (HR) involves a set of residents (graduating medical students) and a set of hospitals, where each hospital has a given capacity. The residents have preferences for the hospitals, as do hospitals for residents. A solution of I is a <i>stable matching</i>, which is an assignment of residents to hospitals that respects the capacity conditions and preference lists in a precise way. In this paper we present constraint encodings for HR that give rise to important structural properties. We also present a computational study using both randomly-generated and real-world instances. We provide additional motivation for our models by indicating how side constraints can be added easily in order to solve hard variants of HR.

• Item Type: Conference Proceedings
• Keywords: Stable matching, constraint satisfaction problem, specialised constraints, arc consistency, GS-lists.
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Manlove, Professor David and Unsworth, Dr Chris and Prosser, Dr Patrick and O'Malley, Dr Gregg
• Authors: Manlove, D.F., O'Malley, G., Prosser, P., and Unsworth, C.
• Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
• Research Group: Formal Analysis, Theory and Algorithms
• Journal Name: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Publisher: Springer
• ISSN: 0302-9743
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2007 Springer
• First Published: First published in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4510:155-170
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher.