An integrated approach for scheduling health care activities in a hospital

Robert L. Burdett and Erhan Kozan

European Journal of Operational Research, 2018, vol. 264, issue 2, 756-773

Abstract: To effectively utilise hospital beds, operating rooms (OR) and other treatment spaces, it is necessary to precisely plan patient admissions and treatments in advance. As patient treatment and recovery times are unequal and uncertain, this is not easy. In response, a sophisticated flexible job-shop scheduling (FJSS) model is introduced, whereby patients, beds, hospital wards and health care activities are respectively treated as jobs, single machines, parallel machines and operations. Our approach is novel because an entire hospital is describable and schedulable in one integrated approach. The scheduling model can be used to recompute timings after deviations, delays, postponements and cancellations. It also includes advanced conditions such as activity and machine setup times, transfer times between activities, blocking limitations and no wait conditions, timing and occupancy restrictions, buffering for robustness, fixed activities and sequences, release times and strict deadlines. To solve the FJSS problem, constructive algorithms and hybrid meta-heuristics have been developed. Our numerical testing shows that the proposed solution techniques are capable of solving problems of real world size. This outcome further highlights the value of the scheduling model and its potential for integration into actual hospital information systems.

Keywords: Scheduling; Flexible job shop; Hospital scheduling; Disjunctive graph model; Hybrid meta-heuristics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221717305921
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:264:y:2018:i:2:p:756-773

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2017.06.051

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().