Hospital-wide therapist scheduling and routing: exact and heuristic methods

Gartner, Daniel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4361-8559, Frey, Markus and Kolisch, Rainer 2018. Hospital-wide therapist scheduling and routing: exact and heuristic methods. IIE Transactions on Healthcare Systems Engineering 8 (4) , pp. 268-279. 10.1080/24725579.2018.1530314

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Abstract

In this paper, we address the problem of scheduling and routing physical therapists hospital-wide. At the beginning of a day, therapy jobs are known to a hospital's physical therapy scheduler who decides for each therapy job when, where and by which therapist a job is performed. If a therapist is assigned to a sequence which contains two consecutive jobs that must take place in different treatment rooms, then transfer times must be considered. We propose three approaches to solve the problem. First, an Integer Program (IP) simultaneously schedules therapies and routes therapists. Second, a cutting plane algorithm iteratively solves the therapy scheduling problem without routing constraints and adds cuts to exclude schedules which have no feasible routes. Since hospitals are interested in obtaining quick solutions, we also propose a heuristic algorithm, which schedules therapies sequentially by simultaneously checking routing and resource constraints. Using real-world data from a hospital, we compare the performance of the three approaches. Our computational analysis reveals that our IP formulation fails to solve test, which have more than~30 jobs, to optimality in an acceptable solution time. In contrast, the cutting plane algorithm can solve instances with more than 100 jobs optimally. The heuristic approach obtains good solutions for large real-world instances within fractions of a second.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Mathematics
Subjects:	R Medicine > RM Therapeutics. Pharmacology
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
ISSN:	1948-8300
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	17 September 2018
Date of Acceptance:	17 September 2018
Last Modified:	25 Nov 2024 02:15
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/114965

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