Offline Patient Admission Scheduling Problems

Patient admission scheduling problems consist in deciding which patient to admit and at what time. More complex problems address also bed assignment problems at the same time. The complexity of the problem motivates researchers to design suitable approaches to support bed managers in making decisions. The aim of this paper is to define an efficient model formulation for the offline elective patient admission scheduling problem, which defines admission dates and assigns patients to rooms. Due to the multiobjective nature of the problem, we suggest how to set weight values, used to penalise constraint violations. These values are tested on a set of benchmark instances. Improvements in schedule quality are presented.