EURO 2025 Leeds
Abstract Submission

1241. The Integrated Healthcare Timetabling Competition 2024 (IHTC-2024)

Invited abstract in session MB-10: Integrated Healthcare Timetabling Competition I, stream Automated Timetabling.

Monday, 10:30-12:00
Room: Clarendon SR 1.06

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Andrea Schaerf
Polytechnic Department of Engineering and Architecture, University of Udine
2. Roberto Maria Rosati
WU Vienna University of Economics and Business
3. Sara Ceschia
Polytechnic Department of Engineering and Architecture, University of Udine
4. Pieter Smet
Computer Science, KU Leuven
5. Greet Vanden Berghe
Computer Science, KU Leuven
6. Eugenia Zanazzo
Polytechnic Department of Engineering and Architecture, University of Udine

Abstract

We launched the Integrated Healthcare Timetabling Competition (IHTC-2024, https://ihtc2024.github.io/) to stimulate research on the specifics of integrated scheduling problems in healthcare.
We introduced the Integrated Healthcare Timetabling Problem (IHTP), which brings together three critical problems in healthcare: surgical case planning, patient admission scheduling, and nurse-to-room assignment. In particular, it requires the following decisions: (i) the admission date for each patient (or admission postponement to the next scheduling period), (ii) the room for each admitted patient for the duration of their stay, (iii) the nurse for each room during each shift of the scheduling period, and (iv) the operating theatre for each admitted patient.

We provided a public dataset composed of 30 instances in JSON format, along with the solution checker (in C++) that certifies the quality of a given solution.
The first stage of the competition is complete, and we received 32 submissions from teams across various European countries. Among all the participants, we selected five finalists, whose solution methods will be evaluated on the hidden dataset in the second stage.

In this talk, we will present the results of the competition, and the general insights that we gained about the problem and the solution methods.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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