Data Mining Support for Scheduling and Resource Allocation: A Case Study

In industry, everybody understands that efficiency of any serious industrial activity is significantly influenced by scheduling. Due to good scheduling the customers can get their ordered goods in time and for reasonable price which is not increased due to extra fee for SKLAD. But scheduling is as important in those types of complex services, which have to be ensured e.g. through cooperation of several persons using restricted number of resources. Such a situation appears often in medical environment. Nurses’ rostering is a well known case which is frequently referred to when describing applications of various techniques for scheduling. But similar problems appear e.g. in a typical health farm or a spa. Spa offers a set of various health procedures to heal medical problems of the patients who are arriving into the health farm for a restricted period. Obviously each patient gets an individual treatment, i.e. a set of procedures assigned to the patient by the spa physician, who makes his choice after careful inspection of the patient upon his arrival. But recommendation of the spa physician is not enough to ensure that the patient gets those procedures he is supposed to get. To reach such a goal it is important to ensure that necessary resources are available in appropriate quantity. Two basic types of resources – human resources (appropriate skilled personal) and technical equipment (e.g. a bath tube or diathermia) have to be combined keeping in mind a number of very diverse local constraints, e.g.