Improving Planning and Scheduling of Appointments at a Rehab Clinic

Abstract: An online simulated model of the routine at a rehab clinic was produced. Even if the model would be used only for long-term planning some results could still be relevant. It is also useful for simulating the response of the system when testing alternative scenarios. The subject of this thesis cannot be easily modeled or defined as any standard operations research problem. It belongs to the very general category of scheduling. Some subproblems include employee scheduling and a variant of the bin packing decision problem. Related processes and practices are queuing theory, resource allocation, model building and simulation. The main problem was to schedule a number of activities, part of assessments or rehab programs, that were to be allocated resources in the form of personnel and locations. Each of the referrals and patients were to be assigned to assessments or programs belonging to a certain rehab team. A regression model was developed to predict the arrival rate of the referrals to the clinic. The scheduling of programs was solved by the use of metaheuristics. The purpose of the simulation modeling was to study the effect of certain scheduling strategies. The results are open to interpretation since almost all measures have tradeoffs. Only the management could decide what should be put into practice. The special cases investigated in this work could be part of the decision.