Min-Conflict Heuristic Approach for Elective Patient Bed Assignment Problem

The patient bed assignment problem (PBAP) consists of assigning a set of patients to a set of beds over a horizon time, by considering not only patient pathologies and state conditions, but also bed availability, and medical needs. The PBAP becomes more complex when dealing with elective patients who require specific clinical needs. A solution to this problem is not trivial to find due to the multiple constraints that are considered. The problem is hence modeled as an optimization problem that aims to minimize a set of penalties related to the non-satisfied constraints. To deal with this complex problem, this paper proposes a constraint satisfaction-based approach to solve the problem, namely the min-conflict algorithm (MCA). The proposed approach is compared with different existing solution approaches to evaluate its performance. The experiments show that the proposed MCA performs better in most benchmark instances in terms of costs and computational time.