Practices continue to struggle with patient scheduling and assuring access to care for their patients. Consequently, practices are seeking new, innovative ways to redesign practice operations to improve patient, physician, and staff satisfaction. One of the foundations of this redesign is Advanced Access. Advanced Access is a system that gives patients the ability to schedule an appointment wit...

This paper investigates a tabu assisted genetic algorithm based hyper-heuristic (hyper-TGA) for personnel scheduling problems. We recently introduced a hyper-heuristic genetic algorithm (hyper-GA) with an adaptive length chromosome which aims to evolve an ordering of low-level heuristics in order to find good quality solutions to given problems. The addition of a tabu method, the focus of this ...

The design of a decision support system for capacity planning in clinical laboratories is discussed. The DSS supports decisions concerning the following questions: how should the laboratory be divided into job shops (departments/sections), how should staff be assigned to workstations and how should samples be assigned to workstations for testing. The decision support system contains modules for...

We report on the use of discrete event simulation modeling to support process improvements at an orthopedic outpatient clinic. The clinic was effective in treating patients, but waiting time and congestion in the clinic created patient dissatisfaction and staff morale issues. The modeling helped to identify improvement alternatives including optimized staffing levels, better patient scheduling,...

Scheduling is an important tool for a manufacturing system, where it can have a major impact on the productivity of a production process. In manufacturing systems, the purpose of scheduling is to minimize the production time and costs, by assigning a production facility when to make, with which staff, and on which equipment. Production scheduling aims to maximize the efficiency of the operation...

MAPGEN (Mixed-initiative Activity Plan GENerator) is a mixed-initiative system that employs automated constraint-based planning, scheduling, and temporal reasoning to assist the Mars Exploration Rover mission operations staff in generating the daily activity plans. This paper describes the mixed-initiative capabilities of MAPGEN, identifies shortcomings with the deployed system, and discusses o...

With the growth of demand for electrical energy, it is a common practice in the power industry to shorten the maintenance duration and often to postpone maintenance tasks. Maintenance or overhaul of generating units is one of the crucial factors in delivering reliable electrical energy. A large part of the overhaul work is to examine the condition of the mechanical and the electrical elements. ...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE In multicase pediatric ear, nose, and throat operating rooms (ORs), brief delays in early case start times often produce a cascading effect of lengthy delays by the end of the day and can often lead to patient, family, and staff dissatisfaction and increased labor costs due to unplanned overtime. We sought to improve actual end of day relative to scheduled end of day fr...

Monte Carlo Tree Search approach with Pareto optimality and pocket algorithm is used to solve and optimize the multi-objective constraint-based staff scheduling problem. The proposed approach has a two-stage selection strategy and the experimental results show that the approach is able to produce solutions for cooperative games.

Call centres are an important tool businesses use to interact with their customers. Their efficiency is especially significant, since long queuing times can reduce customer satisfaction. Assembling the call centre work schedule is a complex task that needs to take various and often mutually conflicting goals into account. In this paper, we present a workforce scheduling system suited for small ...