An optimal decision‐making approach for the management of radiotherapy patients

In this paper, novel integer programming formulations are developed for solving the optimal scheduling of patients waiting for radiotherapy treatment. In this specific clinical domain, the suitable management and control of a patients’ waiting list strongly affect both the quality of the therapeutical outcome, in terms of effectiveness, and the cost‐saving use of the overall therapeutical resources, in terms of efficiency. The proposed models allow the best scheduling strategy to be devised by taking into account the quality of the health care service offered to the patient as well as the status and the preferences of the patient. The computational experiments, carried out on realistic scenarios and considering real data, are very promising and show the efficiency and robustness of the proposed models to address the problem under consideration.