An Agent-Based Metaheuristic with Cooperation Approach applied for patients’scheduling in hospital emergency department

In this paper, we propose an innovative meta-heuristic characterized by a multi-dimensional chromosome where each dimension is driven by a rational agent. These agents have to communicate in order to implement evolving and adaptive genetic operators to accelerate the convergence towards the optimal solution. This cooperative approach is applied to solve the patient scheduling problem in emergency department (ED). This problem is NP-difficult due to the permanent interference between three types of arrival: already programmed patients, non-programmed patients and urgent non-programmed patients. Our scheduling problem has to integrate several dimensions such as medical dimensional, patient dimensional, temporal dimensional. The multi-dimensional aspect of the chromosome is crucial to model the different dimensions of the ED. The main goal of the simulation results is to assess the performance of the proposed agent driven multidimensional chromosome. The simulation results confirm that the intra and inter chromosomal interactions allow to avoid the blind aspect of the genetic operators and impacts the quality of solutions. The agents’ cooperation and its ability to improve efficiently the quality of the solutions by exploring intelligently the research space are confirmed by the drop in average total patient waiting time by 15.09%