Abstract
This paper presents an integrated physician and clinic scheduling problem arising in ambulatory cancer treatment polyclinics, where patients may be assessed by multiple physicians from different clinics in a single visit. The problem focuses on assigning clinic sessions and their associated physicians to shifts in a finite planning horizon. The complexity of this problem stems from the fact that several interdisciplinary clinics need to be clustered together, sharing limited resources. The problem is formulated as a multi-objective optimisation problem. Given the inherent complexity for optimally solving this problem with a standard optimisation software, we develop a hybrid algorithm based on iterated local search and variable neighbourhood descent methods to obtain high quality solutions. Computational results using a set of instances inspired from a case study in a hospital in Canada along with some managerial insights are reported and analysed.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank four anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on a previous version of the paper.
Notes
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.