Particle Therapy Patient Scheduling: Time Estimation for Scheduling Sets of Treatments

In the particle therapy patient scheduling problem (PTPSP) cancer therapies consisting of sequences of treatments have to be planned within a planning horizon of several months. In our previous works we approached PTPSP by decomposing it into a day assignment part and a sequencing part. The decomposition makes the problem more manageable, however, both levels are dependent on a large degree. The aim of this work is to provide and a surrogate objective function that quickly predicts the behavior of the sequencing part with reasonable precision, allowing an improved day assignment w.r.t. the original problem.