Patient-to-room assignment with single-rooms entitlements: Combinatorial insights and integer programming formulations

Tabea Brandt, Christina Büsing and Felix Engelhardt

European Journal of Operational Research, 2025, vol. 325, issue 1, 20-37

Abstract: Patient-to-room assignment (PRA) is a scheduling problem in decision support for hospitals. It consists of assigning patients to rooms during their stay at a hospital according to certain conditions and objectives, e.g., ensuring gender separated rooms, avoiding transfers and respecting single-room requests. This work presents combinatorial insights about the feasibility of PRA and about how (many) single-room requests can be respected. We further compare different integer programming (IP) formulations for PRA as well as the influence of different objectives on the runtime using real-world data. Based on these results, we develop a fast IP-based solution approach, which obtains high quality solutions. In contrast to previous IP-formulations, the results of our computational study indicate that large, real-world instances can be solved to a high degree of optimality within (fractions of) seconds. We support this result by a computational study using a large set of realistic but randomly generated instances with 50% to 95% capacity utilisation.

Keywords: Combinatorial optimisation; Hospital bed management; Patient-to-room assignment; Binary integer programming; Patient admission scheduling; Dynamic planning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:325:y:2025:i:1:p:20-37

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2025.02.018

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