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Scheduling patients in an ambulatory surgical center
Author(s) -
Hsu Ver Ning,
de Matta Renato,
Lee ChungYee
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
naval research logistics (nrl)
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.665
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1520-6750
pISSN - 0894-069X
DOI - 10.1002/nav.10060
Subject(s) - computer science , scheduling (production processes) , tabu search , job shop scheduling , nurse scheduling problem , mathematical optimization , flow shop scheduling , ambulatory , dynamic priority scheduling , operations research , rate monotonic scheduling , schedule , medicine , algorithm , mathematics , surgery , operating system
This paper presents a deterministic approach to schedule patients in an ambulatory surgical center (ASC) such that the number of postanesthesia care unit nurses at the center is minimized. We formulate the patient scheduling problem as new variants of the no‐wait, two‐stage process shop scheduling problem and present computational complexity results for the new scheduling models. Also, we develop a tabu search‐based heuristic algorithm to solve the patient scheduling problem. Our algorithm is shown to be very effective in finding near optimal schedules on a set of real data from a university hospital's ASC. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2003