AccScience Publishing / IJOCTA / Volume 8 / Issue 2 / DOI: 10.11121/ijocta.01.2018.00469
RESEARCH ARTICLE

Dynamic scheduling with cancellations: an application to chemotherapy appointment booking

Yasin G¨o¸cg¨un1*
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1 Department of Industrial Engineering, Altinbas University, Turkey
IJOCTA 2018, 8(2), 161–169; https://doi.org/10.11121/ijocta.01.2018.00469
Received: 27 April 2017 | Accepted: 2 March 2018 | Published online: 22 April 2018
© 2018 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution -Noncommercial 4.0 International License (CC-by the license) ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )
Abstract
We study a dynamic scheduling problem that has the feature of due dates and time windows. This problem arises in chemotherapy scheduling where patients from different types have specific target dates along with time windows for appointment. We consider cancellation of appointments. The problem is modeled as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and approximately solved using a direct-search based approximate dynamic programming (ADP) tehnique. We compare the performance of the ADP technique against the myopic policy under diverse scenarios. Our computational results reveal that the ADP technique outperforms the myopic policy on majority of problem sets we generated.
Keywords
Dynamic scheduling
Markov decision processes
Approximate dynamic programming
Conflict of interest
The authors declare they have no competing interests.
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