AIJul 11, 2023
Integrated Planning in Hospitals: A ReviewSebastian Rachuba, Melanie Reuter-Oppermann, Clemens Thielen
Efficient planning of scarce resources in hospitals is a challenging task for which a large variety of Operations Research and Management Science approaches have been developed since the 1950s. While efficient planning of single resources such as operating rooms, beds, or specific types of staff can already lead to enormous efficiency gains, integrated planning of several resources has been shown to hold even greater potential, and a large number of integrated planning approaches have been presented in the literature over the past decades. This paper provides the first literature review that focuses specifically on the Operations Research and Management Science literature related to integrated planning of different resources in hospitals. We collect the relevant literature and analyze it regarding different aspects such as uncertainty modeling and the use of real-life data. Several cross comparisons reveal interesting insights concerning, e.g., relations between the modeling and solution methods used and the practical implementation of the approaches developed. Moreover, we provide a high-level taxonomy for classifying different resource-focused integration approaches and point out gaps in the literature as well as promising directions for future research.
7.7DSMay 7
Label Correcting Algorithms for the Multiobjective Temporal Shortest Path ProblemEdina Marica, Clemens Thielen, Alina Wittmann
Given a directed, discrete-time temporal graph $G=(V,R)$, a start node $s\in V$, and $p\geq1$ objectives, the single-source multiobjective temporal shortest path problem asks, for each $v\in V$, for the set of nondominated images of temporal $s$-$v$-paths together with a corresponding efficient path for each image. A recent general label setting algorithm for this problem relies on two properties of the objectives - monotonicity and isotonicity. Monotonicity generalizes the nonnegativity assumption required by label setting methods for the classical additive single-objective shortest path problem on static graphs, while isotonicity ensures that the order of the objective values of two paths is preserved when both are extended by the same arc. In this paper, we study the problem without assuming monotonicity and/or isotonicity. A key difficulty in this setting is that zero-duration temporal cycles may need to be traversed an arbitrary finite number of times to generate all nondominated images. This motivates the study of a restricted problem variant in which a maximum admissible path length $K$ is imposed, and only paths containing at most $K$ arcs are considered. We develop general label correcting algorithms for this setting and establish several sufficient conditions under which such a bound is not required, implying that the algorithms compute all nondominated images.