Planning and Scheduling Patient Tests in Hospital Laboratories

Planning and scheduling patient tests is one of the most important functions within hospitals. The objective of this function must be to decrease patient discomfort, to minimize patient stay in hospital as well as to maximize equipment utilization. We propose an integrated planning and scheduling approach, which takes advantage of both hospital domain structure knowledge and generic planning techniques. Our approach is based on the dynamic distributed planning/scheduling paradigm that allows the creation of concise resource allocation plans to service test requests, while trying to distribute the load and reduce communications overhead, thus increasing the performance.