A hybrid SCA-VNS meta-heuristic based on Iterated Hungarian algorithm for physicians and medical staff scheduling problem in outpatient department of large hospitals with multiple branches

Abstract This paper investigates the scheduling problem of physicians and medical staff in outpatient department of large hospitals with multi-branch. The large hospital has several branches and each branch has its own medical staff, while the physicians need to serve in all the branches affiliated to the hospital. In order to improve the working efficiency of physicians, each physician would be equipped with a medical staff during his working hours. The working time of physicians and medical staff have several requirements considering the satisfaction of them. The paper takes into account the demand and the available resources of the hospital, the workload of physicians and medical staff, etc. as the constraints, and the purpose is to minimize the dissatisfaction of physicians, the cost of physicians and the deviation of the frequency of physicians at work in different clinics. Then, a hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm SCA-VNS combining a Sine Cosine Algorithm (SCA) and variable neighborhood search (VNS) based on Iterated Hungarian algorithm, which is incorporated to solve the physicians and medical staff assignment, is proposed to solve this problem. Through computational experiments that available physicians and medical staff scheduling have been generated and perform better than other compared algorithms.