Scheduling Periodic Treatments via Answer Set Programming

The scheduling of periodic treatments consists of planning a care path over a period of several weeks, in which patients have to perform different treatments respecting a certain periodicity. Treatments must be assigned to a day taking into account patients' preferences, operators' availability, the possibility of needing instruments/machinery, and of having different facilities in which operators can work and move around during the working time. This problem has been formulated to have a certain degree of flexibility and to be suitable for different contexts where periodicity is required, e.g. rehabilitation or planning a cycle of drug therapies. In this paper, we present a solution to this problem based on Answer Set Programming (ASP). We consider two different possible scenarios: scheduling one patient at a time, and scheduling blocks of patients. We have also conducted an experimental analysis showing that ASP is a suitable solution to this problem.