Bi-Weekly Talk: Tabea Krabs: One transfer per patient suffices: Structural insights about patient-to-room assignment

Mittwoch, 24.02.2021, 10.30 Uhr

Ort: Online session

Vortragender: Tabea Krabs

 

Abstract: 

Assigning patients to rooms is a fundamental task in hospitals and, especially, within wards. For this so-called patient-to-room assignment problem (PRA) many heuristics have been proposed with a large variety of different practical constraints. However, a thorough investigation of the problem’s structure itself has been neglected so far.
Therefore, in this paper, we present insights about the basic, underlying combinatorial problem of PRA. If there exist patient-room assignment restrictions, that is, not every patient can be assigned to any room, the problem is strongly NP-complete even if all rooms are double-bed rooms. Therefore, we study the problem without such restrictions and focus on minimizing the number of patients who have to change rooms during their stay. Particularly, we prove that in the case of double bedrooms, each patient has to be transferred at most once.

 

Already at 10:00 we meet for a break: Let’s talk, exchange, chat and drink our coffee or tea till the talk starts!

The zoom-room will be open.