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3516. The intra-hospital patient transportation problem with diverse rolling equipment

Invited abstract in session MC-10: Mobility and transportation in healthcare, stream OR in Health Services (ORAHS).

Monday, 12:30-14:00
Room: 11 (building: 116)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Angel Ruiz
Opérations et systèmes de décision, Université Laval
2. Vinicius Martins Ton
Department of Operations and Decision Systems, Université Laval
3. Jose Eduardo Pecora
Administracao Geral e Aplicada, Universidade Federal do Parana

Abstract

Intrahospital patient transportation is a crucial activity to hospital operations that also impacts patients' satisfaction. The problem consists in assigning each of the incoming transport requests to one of the available porters, in such a way that patients arrive to their destination on time, or their lateness is minimized. Some patients (i.e., hospitalized patients) are transported on the bed they occupy, while others (i.e., external patients) require a wheelchair provided by the hospital. Handling different types of transport equipment may require porters to switch equipment between two transport requests. For instance, a porter may have to visit an equipment depot to pickup (drop off) a wheelchair before (after) serving a request which requires it, increasing the total traveled distance, and reducing the availability of porters to answer other requests. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first modeling and solving this realistic version of the intra-hospital patient transportation problem with various types of rolling equipment. We propose and compare the performance of several approaches (including a mixed integer linear programming model, a constraint programming model, a constructive heuristic, and a local search heuristic) with respect to metrics widely used by hospital managers over a set of instances inspired by a real mid-size hospital. The local search heuristic produced excellent results and proved its suitability to be used in real applications.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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