07-04-2010
Quarta-feira, dia 7 de Abril de 2010, às 13:30 horas
Título: On the dynamic dial-a-ride problem for patient transportation in hospitals
Apresentador: Teresa Melo (Saarland University of Applied Sciences, Business School, Germany)
Local: Sala de seminários do edifício VII
Resumo:
Intrahospital transports are often required for diagnostic or therapeutic reasons. Depending on the hospital layout, transportation between nursing wards and service units is either provided by ambulances or by trained personnel who accompany patients on foot. The underlying optimization problem is a dynamic dial-a-ride problem with hospital-specific constraints. After describing the problem, the talk will focus on a novel two-phase heuristic for routing and scheduling transport
requests. In the first phase, a simple insertion scheme is used to generate a feasible solution, which is improved in the second phase with a tabu search algorithm. The heuristic procedure was extensively tested on real data provided by a German hospital. Results show that the algorithm is capable of handling the dynamic aspect of the problem and of providing high-quality solutions. In particular, it succeeded in reducing waiting times for patients while using fewer vehicles. The developed solution methodology is embedded in a computer-based planning system, Opti-TRANS, that supports all phases of the transportation flow, including travel booking, dispatching transport requests, and monitoring and reporting trips in real time. The impact of Opti-TRANS on the daily performance of the patient transportation service of a large German hospital will be illustrated.