Using the hybrid ILS/VND method for solving the patients scheduling problem in emergency department - a case study.

Accurate and quick treatment of patients is the most important aim of the health care systems, especially at emergency departments (ED), as such departments are dealing with life and death situations on a daily basis. Nevertheless, the patients scheduling problem (PSP) is often very difficult to solve in practice particularly by applying manual approaches. To this end, the target of this paper is to study the PSP in ED. We propose a hybrid ILS/VND algorithm that aims to minimize the total waiting time of patient’s. After generating the initial solution using the "Triage - First in First out" (TFF) heuristic, the solution is further improved by employing a VND algorithm. The proposed VND involves four neighborhood structures in order to disrupt the actual solution and provide a better exploration of the search space. The obtained results show that the hybrid ILS/VND algorithm is computationally effective and provides high-quality solutions.