Workforce scheduling in the healthcare sector is a significant operational challenge, characterized by fluctuating patient loads, diverse clinical skills, and the critical need to control labor costs while upholding high standards of patient care. This problem is inherently multi-objective, demanding a delicate balance between competing goals: minimizing payroll, ensuring adequate staffing for patient needs, and accommodating staff preferences to mitigate burnout. We propose a Multi-objective Genetic Algorithm (MOO-GA) that models the hospital unit workforce scheduling problem as a multi-objective optimization task. Our model incorporates real-world complexities, including hourly appointment-driven demand and the use of modular shifts for a multi-skilled workforce. By defining objective functions for cost, patient care coverage, and staff satisfaction, the GA navigates the vast search space to identify a set of high-quality, non-dominated solutions. Demonstrated on datasets representing a typical hospital unit, the results show that our MOO-GA generates robust and balanced schedules. On average, the schedules produced by our algorithm showed a 66\% performance improvement over a baseline that simulates a conventional, manual scheduling process. This approach effectively manages trade-offs between critical operational and staff-centric objectives, providing a practical decision support tool for nurse managers and hospital administrators.

Machine learning classifiers are widely used to make decisions with a major impact on people's lives (e.g. accepting or denying a loan, hiring decisions, etc). In such applications,the learned classifiers need to be both accurate and fair with respect to different groups of people, with different values of variables such as sex and race. This paper focuses on fair feature selection for classification, i.e. methods that select a feature subset aimed at maximising both the accuracy and the fairness of the predictions made by a classifier. More specifically, we compare two recently proposed Genetic Algorithms (GAs) for fair feature selection that are based on two different multi-objective optimisation approaches: (a) a Pareto dominance-based GA; and (b) a lexicographic optimisation-based GA, where maximising accuracy has higher priority than maximising fairness. Both GAs use the same measures of accuracy and fairness, allowing for a controlled comparison. As far as we know, this is the first comparison between the Pareto and lexicographic approaches for fair classification. The results show that, overall, the lexicographic GA outperformed the Pareto GA with respect to accuracy without degradation of the fairness of the learned classifiers. This is an important result because at present nearly all GAs for fair classification are based on the Pareto approach, so these results suggest a promising new direction for research in this area.

Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimization is becoming a hot research area and quite a few papers regarding these algorithms have been published. However the role of local search techniques has not been expanded adequately. This paper studies the role of a local search technique called 2-opt for the Multi-Objective Travelling Salesman Problem (MOTSP). A new mutation operator called Jumping Gene (JG) is also used. Since 2-opt operator was intended for the single objective TSP, its domain has been expanded to MOTSP in this paper. This new technique is applied to the list of KroAB100 cities.