Patient scheduling with periodic deteriorating maintenance on single medical device

In this paper, we study a patient scheduling problem with periodic deteriorating maintenance. The objective is to minimize the number of tardy medical treatment of all the patients. A binary integer programming model is developed to characterize the problem. A three-phase heuristic based on Moore׳s algorithm is proposed for the problem. Numerical experiments are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed heuristic. Results show that the proposed heuristic is able to obtain a relatively good solution in a short computation time. The impact of the key parameters on the performance of the proposed heuristic is discussed. Finally, we develop an earliest due date (EDD) rule based heuristic to optimize another objective, the maximum tardiness, which is more applicable when fairness among patients is considered.