An integrated approach for scheduling health care activities in a hospital

To effectively utilise hospital beds, operating rooms (OR) and other treatment spaces, it is necessary to precisely plan patient admissions and treatments in advance. As patient treatment and recovery times are unequal and uncertain, this is not easy. In response a sophisticated flexible job-shop scheduling (FJSS) model is introduced, whereby patients, beds, hospital wards and health care activities are respectively treated as jobs, single machines, parallel machines and operations. Our approach is novel because an entire hospital is describable and schedulable in one integrated approach. The scheduling model can be used to recompute timings after deviations, delays, postponements and cancellations. It also includes advanced conditions such as activity and machine setup times, transfer times between activities, blocking limitations and no wait conditions, timing and occupancy restrictions, buffering for robustness, fixed activities and sequences, release times and strict deadlines. To solve the FJSS problem, constructive algorithms and hybrid meta-heuristics have been developed. Our numerical testing shows that the proposed solution techniques are capable of solving problems of real world size. This outcome further highlights the value of the scheduling model and its potential for integration into actual hospital information systems.

为有效利用医院床位、手术室（OR）及其他治疗空间，有必要在事先精确规划患者入院及治疗方案。鉴于患者治疗与康复时间的不等与不确定性，此任务颇具挑战。为此，本团队引入了一种高级灵活的作业车间调度（FJSS）模型，其中患者、床位、医院病区及医疗活动分别被视为作业、单机、并行机及操作。本方法之新颖之处在于，整个医院可通过一种整合的方法进行描述与调度。该调度模型能够用于在偏差、延误、延期及取消发生后重新计算时间。此外，它还涵盖了诸如活动与机器设置时间、活动间的转移时间、阻塞限制和无等待条件、时间与占用限制、缓冲以增强鲁棒性、固定活动与序列、释放时间及严格截止日期等高级条件。为解决FJSS问题，已开发出构造性算法与混合元启发式算法。我们的数值测试表明，所提出的解决技术能够解决现实世界规模的问题。此结果进一步凸显了调度模型的价值及其融入实际医院信息系统中的潜力。