Scheduling Pre-Operative Assessment Clinic via Answer Set Programming

The problem of scheduling Pre-Operative Assessment Clinic (PAC) consists of assigning patients to a day for the exams needed before a surgical procedure, taking into account patients with different priority levels, due dates, and operators availability. Realizing a satisfying schedule is of upmost importance for a clinic, since delay in PAC can cause delay in the subsequent phases, causing a decrease in patients' satisfaction. In this paper, we divide the problem in two sub-problems, and present the results of a first preliminary analysis of the two problems based on Answer Set Programming (ASP). In the first sub-problem patients are assigned to a day taking into account a default list of exams; then, the second sub-problem, having the actual list of exams needed by each patient, use the result of the first sub-problem to assign a starting time to each exam. c 2021