Multi-objective scheduling and a resource allocation problem in hospitals

This study addresses the issue of scheduling medical treatments for resident patients in a hospital. Schedules are made daily according to the restrictions on medical equipment and physicians who are being assigned at the same time. The problem is formulated as a multi-objective binary integer programming (BIP) model. Three types of metaheuristics are proposed and implemented to deal with the discrete search space, numerous variables, constraints and multiple objectives: a variable neighborhood search (VNS)-based method, scatter search (SS)-based methods and a non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II). This paper also provides the results of computational experiments and compares their ability to find efficient solutions to the multi-objective scheduling problem.