Physician scheduling problem in Mobile Cabin Hospitals of China during Covid-19 outbreak

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate a novel physician scheduling problem in the Mobile Cabin Hospitals (MCH) which are constructed in Wuhan, China during the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. The shortage of physicians and the surge of patients brought great challenges for physicians scheduling in MCH. The purpose of the studied problem is to get an approximately optimal schedule that reaches the minimum workload for physicians on the premise of satisfying the service requirements of patients as much as possible. We propose a novel hybrid algorithm integrating particle swarm optimization (PSO) and variable neighborhood descent (VND) (named as PSO-VND) to find the approximate global optimal solution. A self-adaptive mechanism is developed to choose the updating operators dynamically during the procedures. Based on the special features of the problem, three neighborhood structures are designed and searched in VND to improve the solution. The experimental comparisons show that the proposed PSO-VND has a significant performance increase than the other competitors.