Research On Multi-path Scheduling Of Appointment Patients With Loop Characteristics In Ophthalmic Clinic

Patient scheduling problem is an important problem in the current research of medical management science.For a typical ophthalmology clinic,we study the patient scheduling problem with different patient paths and appointment times under the multi-stage and multi-server system environment.The processes that patients may go through include consultation,examination,re-consultation and treatment,and four patient paths are formed according to different situations.Among them,there is a circuit between consultation and re-consultation.The goal of this paper is to schedule patients and minimize the completion time of all ophthalmic outpatients.The problem can be divided into two sub-problems,patient-sequence problem and server-allocation problem.The main research of this paper is as follows.Firstly,this paper focuses on the loop characteristics of patient routes and studies the problem of patient-sequence problem,discusses the problem of patient-sequence of the doctor and the problem of patient-sequence between different medical servers by using the method of decision tree.The validity of sorting is proved by calculation.Secondly,in order to solve the server-allocation problem,we develop a hybrid metaheuristic algorithm EDA-VNS combining Estimation-of-Distribution Algorithm(EDA)and Variable Neighborhood Search(VNS).We test the suitability of the approach for the ophthalmology clinic’s problem.Computational results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is capable of providing high-quality solutions within a reasonable computational time.In addition,the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is also compared with several high-performing algorithms to validate its efficiency and the results indicate the advantages of the proposed EDA-VNS algorithm.In the end,we summarize the research content,analyze the limitations of this paper,and prospect the future research.