An evolutionary approach to rehabilitation patient scheduling: A case study

Focusing on real settings, this study aimed to develop an evolutionary approach based on genetic algorithm for solving the problem of rehabilitation patient scheduling to increase service quality by reducing patient waiting time and improve operation efficiency by increasing the therapy equipment utilization. Indeed, due to partial precedence constraints of rehabilitation therapies, the problem can be structured as a hybrid shop scheduling problem that has received little attention to date. In addition, a mixed integer programming model was also constructed as a benchmark to validate the solution quality with small problems. Based on empirical data from a Medical Center in Taiwan, several experiments were conducted to estimate the validity of the proposed algorithm. The results showed that the proposed algorithm can reduce patient waiting time and enhance resource utilization and thus demonstrated the practicality of the proposed algorithm. Indeed, a decision support system embedded with the developed algorithm has been implemented in this medical center. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.