Solving a big-scaled hospital facility layout problem with meta-heuristics algorithms

Abstract

The main objective of the hospital facility layout problem is to place the polyclinics, laboratories and radiology units within the predefined boundaries in such way that minimize the movement cost of patients and healthcare staff. Especially in big-scaled hospitals including several different specialized departments, it is important in terms of hospital efficiency that interacting units are placed closely. Nowadays meta-heuristic algorithms are often used to solve optimization problems such as facility layout. In this study; polyclinic, laboratory and radiology units’ layout of a big-scaled university hospital was organized using three meta-heuristic algorithms which are migrating bird optimization (MBO), tabu search (TS) and simulated annealing (SA). The results were compared with the existing clinic layout. Consequently MBO and SA meta-heuristic algorithms have given the same best results improving the existing clinic layout efficiency approximately by 58%.

Keywords

• Hospital facility layout problem
• Migrating birds optimization
• Optimization problem
• Tabu search
• Simulated annealing