Infusion chair scheduling algorithms based on bin-packing heuristics .

The need for chemotherapy treatments at outpatient settings have significantly increased in the past several years. Ambulatory Infusion Centers are encountering difficulties in matching individual patient needs and infusion chair availability due to the high variability in chemotherapy treatment types and durations. In this research, modified bin-packing heuristics are developed for infusion chair scheduling. Then, this research addresses the simulation-based optimization of infusion chair scheduling to minimize average patient wait time (APWT). Six decision variables are defined to effectively "optimize" infusion chair scheduling, involving "buffer" and "stagger". Also, the modified bin-packing based scheduling heuristics are developed in this research, and then these heuristics are applied and demonstrated for the problem. Furthermore, simulation-based optimizations are used to determine values of decision variables to minimize APWT. The results show that the "optimized" infusion chair scheduling parameters let to an APWT of 7.65 minutes using Fixed Numbers of Bins Best-Fit scheduling heuristic.