Stochastic radiotherapy appointment scheduling

Autor(en)
Roland Braune, Walter Gutjahr, Petra Vogl
Abstrakt

When scheduling the start times for treatment appointments of patients in hospitals or outpatient clinics such as radiotherapy centers, minimizing patient waiting time and simultaneously maximizing resource usage is crucial. Significant uncertainty in the appointment durations makes scheduling those activities particularly challenging. To address and analyze this uncertainty, the current study uses real-world data on appointment durations gathered from an ion beam therapy facility and fits a distribution function to appointment durations. The authors introduce a novel buffer concept, based on percentiles of the fitted distribution, and thereby calculate a planned activity duration that deviates from deterministically assumed durations. The goal is to find a robust baseline schedule which minimizes a weighted sum of patient waiting time, machine uptime, and penalties due to time window violations by determination of an optimal
buffer parameter. To derive a dynamic scheduling strategy from the baseline schedule, the authors introduce a reactive procedure that adapts the schedule to the actual patient flow. The quality of the actual schedule derived this way from a candidate baseline schedule is evaluated by different sampling approaches. For different buffer parameter sizes, different solution evaluation strategies turn out to be superior.

Organisation(en)
Institut für Business Decisions and Analytics, Forschungsgruppe Data Mining and Machine Learning, Institut für Statistik und Operations Research
Journal
Central European Journal of Operations Research
Band
30
Seiten
1239-1277
Anzahl der Seiten
39
ISSN
1435-246X
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10100-021-00762-5
Publikationsdatum
04-2019
Peer-reviewed
Ja
ÖFOS 2012
102001 Artificial Intelligence, 101015 Operations Research, 502017 Logistik
Schlagwörter
ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete
Management Science and Operations Research
Link zum Portal
https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/de/publications/stochastic-radiotherapy-appointment-scheduling(43eecb91-c641-48e5-b68f-9790dc26f92b).html