Article ID: | iaor20125356 |
Volume: | 15 |
Issue: | 5 |
Start Page Number: | 513 |
End Page Number: | 535 |
Publication Date: | Oct 2012 |
Journal: | Journal of Scheduling |
Authors: | Figueira Jos Rui, Jeric Silvija Vlah |
Keywords: | programming: multiple criteria, combinatorial optimization, health services, programming: integer, heuristics, heuristics: genetic algorithms |
This study addresses the issue of scheduling medical treatments for resident patients in a hospital. Schedules are made daily according to the restrictions on medical equipment and physicians who are being assigned at the same time. The problem is formulated as a multi‐objective binary integer programming (BIP) model. Three types of metaheuristics are proposed and implemented to deal with the discrete search space, numerous variables, constraints and multiple objectives: a variable neighborhood search (VNS)‐based method, scatter search (SS)‐based methods and a non‐dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA‐II). This paper also provides the results of computational experiments and compares their ability to find efficient solutions to the multi‐objective scheduling problem.