Online Auction-Based Scheduling of Health Care Services for Outpatients

加拿大人口的迅速老龄化对有限的医疗保健服务提出了越来越多的要求，特别是在该国较偏远的地区。优化调度是应对这一挑战的唯一途径。在本研究中，每个服务都有有限的可用时隙。这些时间段被公布在一个网站上，并向所有门诊病人发送电子邮件。电子邮件指示这些人通过使用网站来表明他们的服务需求。作为竞标者的门诊病人将他们的要求以服务时段的形式表达出来。每个捆绑包由几个时间段组成。每个门诊病人都有一个组成的服务优先级值，以表明相对于所有病人的紧急程度。事实上，优先权价值类似于竞标者在拍卖中愿意支付的价格。为了竞标时段，门诊患者必须考虑与他们的需求相关的特殊约束，例如，套餐的长度、时段的数量和偏好。

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.