The Doctor Rostering Problem - Asser Fahrenholz

Chapter 7
Metaheuristic tests
This chapter will show the performance of the metaheuristics, described in chapter 4, on
a set of problems including one real world problem. Two libraries used during testing
(to output diagrams of the heuristic performances and .xls-files containing the primitive
test data) was the JFreeChart 1 and the Apache POI 2 respectively.
I will begin by explaining the setup of the test, wherein the various key parameters
in the test shall be introduced. After the setup has been explained, the effect of the
test instance variations and the effect of varying configurations of metaheuristics will
be covered respectively. I end this chapter by discussing the pros and cons of GRASP
and SA for the DRP, making a few conclusions based on the observations done in this
chapter.
Appendix C on page 87 contains all summarised test results. All primitive data is
included on the enclosed dvd 3 .
7.1 Test setup
The purpose of the tests is to document the performance of GRASP and Simulated
Annealing on real world test instances, and if possible to support the decision of values
for the parameters. It was only possible to procure one real world problem, so other
instances had to be constructed. All constructed test instances have been constructed
to measure the effect of varying problem parameters on the solution.
The test instances can be found in appendix C.
1 http://www.jfree.org/jfreechart/
2 http://poi.apache.org/
3 In the ”DRP/diagrams/Test” folder
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