A novel scheduling method for reduction of both waiting time and travel time of patients to visit health care units in the case of mobile communication

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes a new scheduling problem for patient visits with two objectives: minimizing patient waiting time and travel time. It also presents a novel encoding method for Genetic Algorithms (GA) that is well-suited for this problem. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed encoding method reduces optimization iterations by 17% compared to conventional methods, and the GA can decrease waiting time by up to 58.2% and travel time by up to 89.3% for specific examples. The novel scheduling problem and the encoding method are two main contributions of this work.

KEYWORDS:

• Discrete event simulation
• Genetic algorithms
• Health care
• Optimization
• Scheduling
• Multi-objective optimisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. A general definition to the concept of online scheduling may be directed to (Han et al. 2015).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada [ALLRP 555161-20].