Efficient health screening: real-time schedule optimization

This work focuses on timetabling problems in health screening services, with an emphasis on providing an immediate and workable schedule. A well-planned schedule can significantly reduce wait time and increase customer satisfaction. In a medical examination center, nurses continuously generate schedules to optimize check-ups for the following day. Despite careful planning, unforeseen events like a customer arriving late or not showing up can easily disrupt these schedules. In such cases, nurses must be able to quickly and effectively create a new schedule that meets all customer requirements while minimizing wait times. Our contributions to this work are twofold: first, we demonstrate how the ant colony system technique can be applied to solve scheduling problems, and second, we utilize parallel computation to create a schedule immediately. Our work shows that these problems may not be feasible or practical using state-of-the-art CPLEX optimizers. We conducted experiments in two different scenarios and found that our technique is highly efficient in handling these problems.