Research on rehabilitation scheduling with coupled and preemptive operations in time slots and continuous time simultaneously

from National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) With the people's ever-growing needs for a better life in new era, national health demands are greatly increasing. However, the capacity for rehabilitation services are quite inadequate. It is challenging for hospitals to maximise the capacity by scheduling rehabilitation treatments. The rehabilitation scheduling problem is a complicated decision-making problem with multiple types of treatments and operations, and constraints among multiple resources. In the face of the contradiction between the huge demands and undeveloped capacity, this project will research on integrated scheduling of rehabilitation tasks based on activity analysis, mathematical modelling, and optimization theory. It focuses on the reactivity of therapists and operations and considers continuous time and time slots simultaneously. It will develop the function and logic models for different operations, such as coupled operations, preemptive operations and multi-skills; formulate a mathematical programming model based on these properties; develop algorithms to solve the model and test it in practice. The current project will extend the previous research to include double time modules instead of single ones, to consider more operations from practice, e.g. coupled tasks and preemptive scheduling. The expected results not only offer approaches solving the main challenged problem in rehabilitation scheduling problems, but also improve the rehabilitation capacity by these new approaches which is valuable in practice.

Funding Source: Non-HK - Others^^