Optimization of patients appointments in chemotherapy treatment unit: heuristic and metaheuristic approaches

Abstract

This research aims to improve the performance of the service of a Chemotherapy Treatment Unit by reducing the waiting time of patients within the unit. In order to fulfill the objective, initially, the chemotherapy treatment unit is deduced as an identical parallel machines scheduling problem with unequal release time and single resource. A mathematical model is developed to generate the optimum schedule. Afterwards, a Tabu search (TS) algorithm is developed. The performance of the TS algorithm is evaluated by comparing results with the mathematical model and the best results of benchmark problems reported in the literature. Later on, an additional resource is considered which converted the problem into a dual resources scheduling problem. Three approaches are proposed to solve this problem; namely, heuristics, a Tabu search algorithm with heuristic (TSHu), and Tabu search algorithm for dual resources (TSD).