A novel scheduling method for reduction of both waiting time and travel time of patients to visit health care units in the case of mobile communication

This paper proposes a new scheduling problem for patient visits with two objectives: minimizing patient waiting time and travel time. It also presents a novel encoding method for Genetic Algorithms (GA) that is well-suited for this problem. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed encoding method reduces optimization iterations by 17% compared to conventional methods, and the GA can decrease waiting time by up to 58.2% and travel time by up to 89.3% for specific examples. The novel scheduling problem and the encoding method are two main contributions of this work.

Automated summary

This paper presents a new scheduling problem for patient visits that aims to minimize patient waiting time and travel time. A novel encoding method for Genetic Algorithms (GA) is proposed, which is found to reduce optimization iterations by 17% compared to conventional methods. The GA can significantly decrease waiting time by up to 58.2% and travel time by up to 89.3% for specific examples. The main contributions of this work are the novel scheduling problem and the proposed encoding method.