Late acceptance hill climbing algorithm for solving patient admission scheduling problem

This article tackles a patient admission scheduling using Late Acceptance Hill Climbing Algorithm (LAHC). The LAHC algorithm is among the newly proposed metaheuristic-based algorithm which belongs to the one-point solution technique. Patient admission scheduling is a complex combinatorial optimization problem which have been proven to belongs to class of NP-hard problem in almost all its variations. This problem is concerns with assigning a set of patients arriving for medical services in the hospital to a set of rooms, timeslots and beds subject to satisfying a set of predefined constraints. The proposed adaptation of LAHC to the patient admission scheduling named LAHC-based PAS comes in two stages: the first stage involves generating of initial feasible solution using the room oriented-based approach (ROP), while the second stage utilizes three neighbourhood structures which are embedded within the component of LAHC-based PAS to further enhances the initial solution generated at the initial stage. The proposed LAHC method is evaluated using the standard benchmark dataset. The experimental results shows that the proposed method is an effective technique for tackling the PAS problem. It is observed that the method outperform many of the existing techniques when compared with the state-of-the-arts.