Simulation optimization approach for patient scheduling at destination medical centers

This study presents a simulation optimization approach for scheduling medical tourists who travel to destination medical centers (DMCs). The objective of this research is two-fold: (1) to minimize deviations from a patient's preferred start day and (2) to minimize the flow time of patients at the DMC. The duration of treatment is considered uncertain, and patients are scheduled over a multiday scheduling window. This problem is modeled as a flow-shop scheduling problem (FSP) where each patient should undergo a specific number of stages to complete treatment. The goal is to assign patients to different days within the time horizon such that the minimum deviation from the patient's preferred start day and the minimum average patient flow time are achieved. Due to the complex and stochastic nature of the problem, the simulation-optimization approach is used. This approach includes simulation evaluation at each iteration of the optimization procedure. The optimization procedures used in this research are tabu search (TS) and simulated annealing (SA). Finally, several test problems are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed simulation optimization approach. Based on our results, the total cost of the proposed model is significantly less than that of the problem without any admission planning and patient sequencing.