This paper offers a summary of the latest studies on healthcare scheduling problems including patients' admission scheduling problem, nurse scheduling problem, operation room scheduling problem, surgery scheduling problem and other healthcare scheduling problems. The paper provides a comprehensive survey on healthcare scheduling focuses on the recent literature. The development of healthcare scheduling research plays a critical role in optimizing costs and improving the patient flow, providing prompt administration of treatment, and the optimal use of the resources provided and accessible in the hospitals. In the last decades, the healthcare scheduling methods that aim to automate the search for optimal resource management in hospitals by using metaheuristics methods have proliferated. However, the reported results are disintegrated since they solved every specific problem independently, given that there are many versions of problem definition and various data sets available for each of these problems. Therefore, this paper integrates the existing results by performing a comprehensive review and analyzing 190 articles based on four essential components in solving optimization problems: problem definition, formulations, data sets, and methods. This paper summarizes the latest healthcare scheduling problems focusing on patients' admission scheduling problems, nurse scheduling problems, and operation room scheduling problems considering these are the most common issues found in the literature. Furthermore, this review aims to help researchers to highlight some development from the most recent papers and grasp the new trends for future directions.
This paper aims to tackle the Patient Admission Scheduling Problem (PASP) using the Discrete Flower Pollination Algorithm (DFPA), a new, meta-heuristic optimization method based on plant pollination. PASP is one of the most important problems in the field of health care. It is a highly constrained and combinatorial optimization problem of assigning patients to medical resources in a hospital, subject to predefined constraints, while maximizing patient comfort. While the flower pollination algorithm was designed for continuous optimization domains, a discretization of the algorithm has been carried out for application to the PASP. Various neighborhood structures have been employed to enhance the method, and to explore more solutions in the search space. The proposed method has been tested on six instances of benchmark datasets for comparison against another algorithm using the same dataset. The prospective method is shown to be very efficient in solving any scheduling problem.