Patient Transportation in Hospitals

Planning transport processes in hospitals is a quite complex and involved task. This talk focuses on novel heuristics for online routing and scheduling vehicles that serve requests for in-house transports of patients in a hospital (a specific type of dial-a-ride problems). Hospital inherent aspects include, among others, accounting for transport priorities, different vehicle types and personnel skills, and soft time windows with respect to the desired pickup and/or drop-off times. These aspects significantly complicate the construction and modification of high-quality feasible schedules. Using real data from German hospitals, the usefulness of the developed heuristic is shown.