Multi-stage appointment scheduling for outpatient chemotherapy unit: a case study

This paper deals with a multi stage hybrid flow-shop problem (HFSP) that arises in privately Chemotherapy clinic. It aims to optimize the makespan of daily chemotherapy activity. Each patient must respect cyclic nature treatment plans made by his referent on- cologist while taking into account high variability resource requirements (treatment time, nurse pharmacy time). The requires assignment patients oncologists, pharmacists, beds or chairs and nurses over 1-day period. We provided Mixed Integer Program (MIP) model this issue, which can be considered as five-stage scheduling additional resources, dedicated machines, no-wait constraints. Since is known NP-hard, we lower bound expression developed an approximated solving algorithm: tabu search inspired metaheuristic based on constructive heuristic quickly reach satisfying results. To assess empirical performance proposed approach, conducted experi- ments randomly generated instances real-world data Tunisian private clinic: Clinique Ennasr. Computational experiments show efficiency procedures: mathematical optimal solutions reasonable computational time only for small (up 10 patients). Meta-heuristic’s results demonstrate, also, approach offers good terms solution quality times average relative gap MIP equal 3.13% 5.37% 15 same increases 25% medium large size (20–50