DESIGNING AN OUTPATIENT-APPOINTMENT SCHEDULING USING AHP AND SIMULATED ANNEALING
Y. Khawaled, Mahmoud H. Alrefaei, M. Smadi, A. Alawneh · International Journal of Apllied Mathematics · 2022
In this paper, we consider the problem of designing an efficient appointment system of an outpatient department of a healthcare system in order to optimize the performance of the clinic.This problem includes optimizing three objectives, therefore it is considered as a multi-objective optimization problem (MOOP).One way for solving the MOOP is to use the weighted sum method at which all objectives are aggregated into a single objective using relative weights for each objective based on their importance, then one can use any optimization method to solve the aggregated problem.The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is used to select these relative weights, then the simulated annealing (SA) method is implemented to solve the aggregated optimization problem.The proposed AHP-SA algorithm is used to solve a real case appointment system.The obtained numerical results indicate that the proposed method indeed gives relatively good solutions based on the importance level of each objective.