Use of VNS heuristics for scheduling of patients in hospital

S Vlah, Z Lukač and J Pacheco ()
Additional contact information
S Vlah: University of Zagreb
Z Lukač: University of Zagreb
J Pacheco: University of Burgos

Journal of the Operational Research Society, 2011, vol. 62, issue 7, 1227-1238

Abstract: Abstract One of the important problems in hospital management is how to schedule the treatments of resident patients in hospital for a given day due to the restrictions imposed by their medical condition as well as restrictions on medical machines and qualified medical personnel availability. Patients are to be subjected to different kinds of treatments, each requiring a medical machine of a certain type as well as a physician being qualified to operate it. This is a highly complex problem not yet adequately addressed in the literature. At present in most hospitals the problem is being solved manually by specialized personnel. However, the resulting schedules are very often inaccurate and inefficient with patients waiting for a long time to be treated and medical personnel often working overtime. In this paper we formulate the model for this problem and develop a simple and efficient method based on Variable Neighbourhood Search for solving it. The heuristics has been tested on real-life as well as on generated instances. Numerical results show that the heuristics proposed outperform commercial software for optimization as well as manual solutions both in quality of solution and in computational time.

Keywords: health service; scheduling; hospitals; heuristics; reduced VNS (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1057/jors.2010.73 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:pal:jorsoc:v:62:y:2011:i:7:d:10.1057_jors.2010.73

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... search/journal/41274

DOI: 10.1057/jors.2010.73

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the Operational Research Society is currently edited by Tom Archibald and Jonathan Crook

More articles in Journal of the Operational Research Society from Palgrave Macmillan, The OR Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().