Simheuristic of patient scheduling using a table-experiment approach — Simio and Matlab integration application

This paper focuses on optimizing patient scheduling at a breast cancer center for two types of patients: follow up and consult patients. Follow up and consult patients have different service times and follow different care pathways. The objective of this paper is to sequence the patients such that minimum average flow time is achieved for each patient type. A simheuristic framework is developed by integrating MATLAB, Simio, and Excel. Unlike existing simulation-optimization (SO) approaches that target the simulation model controls, this framework tries to optimize a data table in the simulation environment. This simulation evaluation (SE) approach could iteratively input patients arrival table into the simulation model, and obtains the expected performance of the system as a reference to generate the next solution. The obtained results from this framework are further analyzed by comparing five heuristic appointment scheduling methods.