Online Auction-Based Scheduling of Health Care Services for Outpatients

基于在线拍卖的门诊医疗服务安排

• 批准号: 262075-2013
• 负责人: Zhu, Haibin
• 金额: $ 1.09万
• 依托单位: Nipissing University
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2015-01-01 至 2016-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=571225
• 关键词: Online; Auction; Based; Scheduling; Health

Canada's rapidly aging population is placing ever increasing demands on limited health care services, especially in more remote regions of the country. Optimized scheduling is the only way to meet this challenge. In this research, each service has a limited number of available time slots. These time slots are posted on a website and a group email is sent to all outpatients. The email directs these individuals to indicate their service requirements by using the website. Outpatients as bidders express their requests as bundles of service time slots. Each bundle consists of several time slots. Each outpatient has a composed priority value for a service to indicate the level of urgency relative to all patients. In fact, the priority value is similar to the price a bidder is willing to pay in an auction. To bid for time slots, outpatients must consider special constraints relative to their needs, e.g., length of the bundles, number of slots, and preferences. Request collection will be closed at the expiration time indicated in the email. The scheduling program is then activated, its goal being optimization of the whole prices (priority values) by assigning time slots to outpatients relative to their constraints. This is in fact a kind of Winner Determination Problem (WDP) that is NP-hard (non-deterministic polynomial-time hard). After the program obtains the result, a new schedule is communicated to the outpatients. This research is aimed to 1) provide a Web-based platform (including a website and all the developed optimization codes) for the outpatient bidding process; and 2) introduce heuristics to improve the efficiency of algorithms for auction-based scheduling problems with the intent of creating acceptable near optimization results. A solid foundation for this proposed research is established by results from the applicant's previous NSERC research on Role-Based Collaboration (RBC) and Outpatient Scheduling, i.e., Group Role Assignment Problems (GRAPs) and its applications, which have been formalized and solved through development of efficient algorithms.

加拿大迅速老龄化的人口对有限的医疗保健服务提出了越来越高的需求，特别是在该国更偏远的地区。优化调度是迎接这一挑战的唯一途径。在这项研究中，每项服务的可用时隙数量都是有限的。这些时段被发布在网站上，并向所有门诊患者发送一封群发电子邮件。这封电子邮件指示这些个人通过使用该网站来指明他们的服务要求。作为投标者的门诊患者将他们的请求表达为捆绑的服务时段。每个捆绑包由几个时隙组成。每个门诊患者都有一个服务的组合优先级值，以指示相对于所有患者的紧急程度。事实上，优先价值与投标人愿意在拍卖中支付的价格相似。为了争取时段，门诊患者必须考虑与他们的需求相关的特殊限制，例如，捆绑的长度、时段的数量和偏好。 请求收集将在电子邮件中指定的到期时间关闭。然后启动调度程序，其目标是通过为门诊患者分配相对于他们的约束的时间段来优化整体价格(优先级值)。这实际上是一种NP难(非确定性多项式时间难)的赢家确定问题(WDP)。在程序获得结果后，将新的时间表传达给门诊患者。 本研究的目的是1)为门诊招投标过程提供一个基于Web的平台(包括一个网站和所有开发的优化代码)；2)引入启发式算法来提高基于拍卖的调度问题的算法效率，目的是产生可接受的准优化结果。申请人先前的NSERC关于基于角色的协作(RBC)和门诊调度的研究结果，即小组角色分配问题(GRAP)及其应用，为这项拟议的研究奠定了坚实的基础，这些研究已经被形式化，并通过开发有效的算法来解决。