Paper Info
Title
Multi-agent Pareto appointment exchanging in hospital patient scheduling
Abstract
We present a dynamic and distributed approach to the hospital patient scheduling problem, in which patients can have multiple appointments that have to be scheduled to different resources. To efficiently solve this problem we develop a multi-agent Pareto-improvement appointment exchanging algorithm: MPAEX. It respects the decentralization of scheduling authorities and continuously improves patient schedules in response to the dynamic environment. We present models of the hospital patient scheduling problem in terms of the health care cycle where a doctor repeatedly orders sets of activities to diagnose and/or treat a patient. We introduce the Theil index to the health care domain to characterize different hospital patient scheduling problems in terms of the degree of relative workload inequality between required resources. In experiments that simulate a broad range of hospital patient scheduling problems, we extensively compare the performance of MPAEX to a set of scheduling benchmarks. The distributed and dynamic MPAEX performs almost as good as the best centralized and static scheduling heuristic, and is robust for variations in the model settings.
Year
DOI
Venue
2007
10.1007/s11761-007-0012-1
Service Oriented Computing and Applications
Keywords
Field
DocType
health care · patient scheduling · multi-agent systems,indexation,multi agent system,health care,scheduling problem
Fair-share scheduling,Computer science,Deadline-monotonic scheduling,Flow shop scheduling,Nurse scheduling problem,Real-time computing,Rate-monotonic scheduling,Earliest deadline first scheduling,Dynamic priority scheduling,Round-robin scheduling
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
1
3
1863-2394
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
11
0.79
17
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ivan Vermeulen1242.43
Sander M. Bohte236534.58
Koye Somefun3243.63
Johannes A. La Poutré430824.78