Examination and Operating Room Scheduling including Optimization of Intra-hospital Routing.

Hospitalized patients typically undergo several examinations before their actual surgery. Transportation between service units is provided by trained personnel who escort patients. However, valuable resources may be underutilized if patients arrive too late for scheduled appointments, whereas on the other side, many patients have to wait for a long time before being picked up for, or after, their actual appointment. To improve those deficits, this study adopts on both resource- and client-centered perspectives. Therefore, we present an integrative combinatorial optimization model combining both scheduling- and routing-related aspects, which will be solved using a cooperative hybrid metaheuristic. Traditionally, both underlying subproblems would be solved independently, but the cooperative approach yields substantial advantages over decoupled hierarchical optimization processes.