Weekly Physician Scheduling for Emergency Departments with Time-Varying Demands of Patients with Revisits

Abstract

To solve the flexible scheduling problem of emergency departments, a method based on the queuing theory and the fluid model for approximating the patient waiting length of a time-varying queuing system with returns for a given scheduling plan is proposed. A mixed-integer programming model, which considers the real constraints of physician scheduling, is then proposed and solved by using a tabu search algorithm. Numerical experiments show that the proposed method can effectively approximate the waiting queue length of patients and the scheduling plan computed by the proposed algorithm can effectively reduce the total waiting queue length of patients.

Keywords

• emergency departments
• time-varying demands of patients with revisits
• flexible scheduling
• weekly physician scheduling problem
• queuing theory