A modified biogeography-based optimization algorithm with guided bed selection mechanism for patient admission scheduling problems.

One of the complex combinatorial optimization problems is the Patient admission scheduling problem (PASP), which is concerned with assigning the patients arriving into a hospital to available beds to get medical services. The objective of PASP is to maximize the patients comfort, medical treatment effectiveness, and hospital utilization. This research proposes a new approach based on Biogeography-Based Optimization (BBO) algorithm for tacking the PASP. BBO was inspired from the idea of species migration between different habitats. Due to the complexity of the search space in PASP, the original BBO has been equipped with a guided bed selection (GBS) mechanism in order to improve its results and performance, as well as the operator capabilities of BBO which are modified to improve its diversity. These three variants of BBO are compared with each other using six de facto data sets that are widely used in the literature with varying sizes and complexity. The modified BBO is able to yield better results than the other variants. In a nutshell, this paper provides a new PASP method that can be considered an efficient alternative for the scheduling domain to be used by other researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]