Journal Title
Title of Journal: OR Spectrum
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Publisher
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
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Authors: J Theresia van Essen Mark van Houdenhoven Johann L Hurink
Publish Date: 2014/05/31
Volume: 37, Issue: 1, Pages: 243-271
Abstract
When the number of available beds in a hospital is limited it can be beneficial to cluster several clinical departments such that the probability of not being able to admit a patient is acceptably small However not all clinical departments can be clustered for crossinfection reasons In addition patients from one clinical department should not be spread out over the entire hospital as this complicates the process of doing rounds and may result in alternate level of care In this paper we consider a situation where wards with a fixed number of beds are given The question is how to cluster the clinical departments and to determine the assignment of these clustered departments to the available wards such that the assigned beds are sufficient to guarantee a blocking probability below a prespecified percentage We first give an exact formulation of the problem to be able to achieve optimal solutions However computational experiments show that the resulting computation times for this model are too long for it to be applicable in practice To reduce the computation time we introduce two heuristic solution approaches The first heuristic uses the same formulation as the exact model however the number of required beds is approximated by a linear function The resulting model is again solved by an exact solver The second heuristic uses a restricted version of the exact model within a local search approach Hereby the local search is used to determine the assignment of clinical departments to clusters and the exact model is used to determine the assignment of clusters to wardsThis research is supported by the Dutch Technology Foundation STW applied science division of NWO and the Technology Program of the Ministry of Economic Affairs We would like to thank the anonymous referees and Erwin Hans for their useful comments which helped to improve the paper
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