Late acceptance hill climbing algorithm for solving patient admission scheduling problem

A room-oriented artificial bee colony algorithm for optimizing the patient admission scheduling problem

Patient admission scheduling (PAS) is a tasking combinatorial optimization problem where a set of patients is assigned to limited facilities such as rooms, timeslots, and beds subject to satisfying a set of predefined constraints. The investigations into the performance of population-based algorithms that utilized to tackle the PAS problem considered in this paper reveal their weaknesses in obtaining quality solutions that create a space to investigate the performance of another population-based method. Thus, in this paper, an Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm (ABC) is proposed to tackle the formulation of the PAS problem under consideration. It is a class of swarm intelligence metaheuristic algorithms based on the intelligent foraging behaviour of honey bees developed to solve continuous and complex optimization problems. Due to the discretization of the PAS, the continuous nature of the ABC algorithm is changed to cope with the rugged solution space of the PAS. The initial feasible solution to the PAS problem is obtained using the room-oriented approach. Then the ABC algorithm optimizes the feasible solutions with the aid of three neighbourhood structures embedded within the employed bee and the onlooker bee operators of the algorithm. The performance of the proposed ABC algorithm based on three different parameters, the solution number (SN), limit value (LV), and the maximum cycle number (MCN) is evaluated on six standard benchmark datasets of the PAS. Two of these main parameters (i.e. SN and LV) are fine-tuned to obtain the best solutions on instances like Test-data 1 = 679.80, Test-data 2 = 1180.40, Test-data 3 = 787.40, Test-data 4 = 1198.60, Test-data 5 = 636.80, and Test-data 6 = 818.60. The best solutions obtained by the proposed method are evaluated against the results of the 19 comparative algorithms comprising five population-based methods, eleven heuristic, and hyperheuristic-based methods, and three integer programming-based methods. The proposed method shows its supremacy in the performance by achieving the best results in all the instances of the dataset when compared with five population-based methods (DFPA, HSA, MBBO-GBS, BBO-GBS, and BBO-RBS) and producing the best results in five instances when compared with eleven heuristic and hyperheuristic-based methods (LAHC, DHS-GD, HTS, DHS-SA, ADAPTIVE GD, GD, HH-GD, DHS-IO, HH-SA, HH-IE, TA) and Finally, it had a competitive performance with the other three Integer programming methods (MIP warm start, MIP-Heuristic, CG) that worked on the same formulations of the PAS. In a nutshell, the proposed ABC algorithm could be adopted as a new template algorithm for the PAS community.

Window-Based Multi-Objective Optimization for Dynamic Patient Scheduling with Problem-Specific Operators

The problem of patient admission scheduling (PAS) is a nondeterministic polynomial time (NP)-hard combinatorial optimization problem with numerous constraints. Researchers have divided the constraints of this problem into hard (i.e., feasible solution) and soft constraints (i.e., quality solution). The majority of research has dealt with PAS using integer linear programming (ILP) and single objective meta-heuristic searching-based approaches. ILP-based approaches carry high computational demand and the risk of non-feasibility for a large dataset. In a single objective optimization, there is a risk of local minima due to the non-convexity of the problem. In this article, we present the first pareto front-based optimization for PAS using set of meta-heuristic approaches. We selected four multi-objective optimization methods. Problem-specific operators were developed for each of them. Next, we compared them with single objective optimization approaches, namely, simulated annealing and particle swarm optimization. In addition, this article also deals with the dynamical aspect of this problem by comparing historical window-based decomposition with day decomposition, as has previously been proposed in the literature. An evaluation of the models proposed in the article and comparison with traditional models reveals the superiority of our proposed multi-objective optimization with window incorporation in terms of optimality.

Appointment Scheduling Problem in Complexity Systems of the Healthcare Services: A Comprehensive Review

This paper provides a comprehensive review of Appointment Scheduling (AS) in healthcare service while we propose appointment scheduling problems and various applications and solution approaches in healthcare systems. For this purpose, more than 150 scientific papers are critically reviewed. The literature and the articles are categorized based on several problem specifications, i.e., the flow of patients, patient preferences, and random arrival time and service. Several methods have been proposed to shorten the patient waiting time resulting in the shortest idle times in healthcare centers. Among existing modeling such as simulation models, mathematical optimization techniques, Markov chain, and artificial intelligence are the most practical approaches to optimizing or improving patient satisfaction in healthcare centers. In this study, various criteria are selected for structuring the recent literature dealing with outpatient scheduling problems at the strategic, tactical, or operational levels. Based on the review papers, some new overviews, problem settings, and hybrid modeling approaches are highlighted.

Discrete flower pollination algorithm for patient admission scheduling problem

This paper aims to tackle the Patient Admission Scheduling Problem (PASP) using the Discrete Flower Pollination Algorithm (DFPA), a new, meta-heuristic optimization method based on plant pollination. PASP is one of the most important problems in the field of health care. It is a highly constrained and combinatorial optimization problem of assigning patients to medical resources in a hospital, subject to predefined constraints, while maximizing patient comfort. While the flower pollination algorithm was designed for continuous optimization domains, a discretization of the algorithm has been carried out for application to the PASP. Various neighborhood structures have been employed to enhance the method, and to explore more solutions in the search space. The proposed method has been tested on six instances of benchmark datasets for comparison against another algorithm using the same dataset. The prospective method is shown to be very efficient in solving any scheduling problem.

Healthcare scheduling in optimization context: a review

This paper offers a summary of the latest studies on healthcare scheduling problems including patients' admission scheduling problem, nurse scheduling problem, operation room scheduling problem, surgery scheduling problem and other healthcare scheduling problems. The paper provides a comprehensive survey on healthcare scheduling focuses on the recent literature. The development of healthcare scheduling research plays a critical role in optimizing costs and improving the patient flow, providing prompt administration of treatment, and the optimal use of the resources provided and accessible in the hospitals. In the last decades, the healthcare scheduling methods that aim to automate the search for optimal resource management in hospitals by using metaheuristics methods have proliferated. However, the reported results are disintegrated since they solved every specific problem independently, given that there are many versions of problem definition and various data sets available for each of these problems. Therefore, this paper integrates the existing results by performing a comprehensive review and analyzing 190 articles based on four essential components in solving optimization problems: problem definition, formulations, data sets, and methods. This paper summarizes the latest healthcare scheduling problems focusing on patients' admission scheduling problems, nurse scheduling problems, and operation room scheduling problems considering these are the most common issues found in the literature. Furthermore, this review aims to help researchers to highlight some development from the most recent papers and grasp the new trends for future directions.

Development of Intelligent Drone Battery Charging System Based on Wireless Power Transmission Using Hill Climbing Algorithm

In this work, an advanced drone battery charging system is developed. The system is composed of a drone charging station with multiple power transmitters and a receiver to charge the battery of a drone. A resonance inductive coupling-based wireless power transmission technique is used. With limits of wireless power transmission in inductive coupling, it is necessary that the coupling between a transmitter and receiver be strong for efficient power transmission; however, for a drone, it is normally hard to land it properly on a charging station or a charging device to get maximum coupling for efficient wireless power transmission. Normally, some physical sensors such as ultrasonic sensors and infrared sensors are used to align the transmitter and receiver for proper coupling and wireless power transmission; however, in this system, a novel method based on the hill climbing algorithm is proposed to control the coupling between the transmitter and a receiver without using any physical sensor. The feasibility of the proposed algorithm was checked using MATLAB. A practical test bench was developed for the system and several experiments were conducted under different scenarios. The system is fully automatic and gives 98.8% accuracy (achieved under different test scenarios) for mitigating the poor landing effect. Also, the efficiency η of 85% is achieved for wireless power transmission. The test results show that the proposed drone battery charging system is efficient enough to mitigate the coupling effect caused by the poor landing of the drone, with the possibility to land freely on the charging station without the worry of power transmission loss.