Scandinavian Working Papers in Economics

Discussion Papers on Economics,
University of Southern Denmark, Department of Economics

No 1/2013: A column generation approach for solving the patient admission scheduling problem

Troels Martin Range (), Richard Martin Lusby () and Jesper Larsen ()
Additional contact information
Troels Martin Range: Department of Business and Economics, Postal: University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, DK-5230 Odense M, Denmark
Richard Martin Lusby: Department of Engineering Management, Postal: Technical University of Denmark, Produktionstorvet, building 426, 2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark
Jesper Larsen: Department of Engineering Management, Postal: Technical University of Denmark, Produktionstorvet, building 426, 2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark

Abstract: This paper addresses the Patient Admission Scheduling (PAS) problem. The PAS problem deals with assigning elective patients to beds, satisfying a number of soft and hard constraints. The problem can be seen as part of the functions of hospital management at an operational level. There exists a small number of different variants on this problem. We propose an optimization-based heuristic building on branch-and-bound, column generation, and dynamic constraint aggregation for one of the variants. We achieve tighter bounds than previously reported in the literature, and in addition we are able to produce new best solutions for five out of six instances from a publicly available repository.

Keywords: Patient admission scheduling; column generation; dynamic constraint aggregation; dual disaggregation; branch-and-bound

JEL-codes: C61

22 pages, January 9, 2013

Full text files 

dpbe1_2013.pdf PDF-file Full text

Download statistics

Questions (including download problems) about the papers in this series should be directed to Astrid Holm Nielsen ()
Report other problems with accessing this service to Sune Karlsson ().

RePEc:hhs:sdueko:2013_001This page generated on 2024-09-13 22:17:01.