Optimal Scheduling Of Large Medical Equipment

This paper presents a detailed investigation on the appointment scheduling of MRI examination.By analyzing the operating time of different body parts on MRI,the distribution of the operating times and the preparation time between different examinations are obtained.Then the utilization of the MRI is improved through optimal appointment scheduling for the patients.Firstly,this paper considered the single machine scheduling problem with the objective of minimizing the make span while release times and sequence-dependent set-up times of the jobs are assumed to exist.Three lower bound procedures were addressed and a best index dispatch(BID)heuristic was proposed to solve the problem.Besides,a numerical experiment was carried out on the actual data of MRI in a Shanghai hospital.The results showed that the BID algorithm could reduce the make span by 25% on average.Secondly,this paper considered a single machine due window scheduling problem under similar optimization goals and different constraints.The due window problem with release dates and sequence dependent setup times was studied based on a numerical experiment of certain Shanghai hospital 2015 MRI data.The impact of the due window was considered by adjusting the size of the due window.And thus,effective practical applications for the MRI schedules were proposed which will improve the utilization of the resources and reduce the waiting time of patients.