Adaptive iterated local search algorithm for dynamic patient admission scheduling problems

Healthcare resource management is essential for ensuring the quality of patient care. However, it can be a complex and costly task. This work addresses the patient admission scheduling (PAS) problem, a complex aspect of healthcare resource management. PAS aims to allocate patients to hospital beds within a planning horizon, subject to a variety of healthcare constraints. The goal is to maximize management efficiency and patient comfort to improve medical treatment. In this work, we consider a practical variant of PAS known as dynamic PAS (DPAS). DPAS considers several factors and constraints, such as the daily registration of new patients, urgent patients, uncertainties in stay lengths, operating theatre resources, and the surgery scheduling process. An effective and efficient adaptive iterated local search (AILS) algorithm is proposed to solve DPAS. To enable the search to explore the search space efficiently, the proposed AILS adaptively integrates a number of components. Two adaptive perturbation strategies are devised to locate unexplored areas in the search space. To exploit the newly discovered areas effectively, we propose an adaptive local search mechanism as an intensification strategy to find a high-quality solution. The proposed AILS algorithm is compared to benchmark problems used by existing algorithms. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach. Specifically, out of 30 tested instances, AILS obtains 17 of the best-known results using less computational time.