Integrated deteriorating maintenance and patient scheduling for single medical device with heuristic algorithm. (11th September 2020) - Liu, Qinming
This paper aims to propose a two-phase model integrated patient scheduling and medical device maintenance to improve their reliability, reduce operating costs, and increase operating efficiency. In this paper, one patient scheduling problem with time-window deteriorating maintenance is studied. The objective is to minimise the maximum tardiness of all patients. First, a two-phase mathematical model is developed to characterise the problem. One model is used to solve the lower bound of the number of maintenance activities, and the other is used to obtain the patient scheduling solution. Then, one heuristic is developed for the problem. Finally, numerical experiments can be performed to indicate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed methods. The results show that the proposed methods have a better performance for the patient scheduling problem and can be able to obtain one good solution in a short computation time. Few studies have been carried out to integrate decisions between patient scheduling and device maintenance. Their considerations are either incomplete or not realistic enough. A more comprehensive and realistic two-phase model is proposed in this paper.