Multi-neighborhood simulated annealing for the integrated patient-to-room and nurse-to-patient assignment problem

Abstract We consider a recently proposed integrated healthcare problem that deals with the assignment of patients to suitable rooms in wards (Patient-to-Room) and the assignment of nurses to patients to balance their workload and reduce patient disturbance (Nurse-to-Patient), in one single stage. For this problem, we designed an integrated local search method that uses four distinct neighborhoods and is guided by a Simulated Annealing metaheuristic. We configured and tuned our search method, ran it on the available datasets with different running times, and validated it using the available solution checker. Finally, we compared the results with the ones available in the literature and with a sequential version of our method. The outcome is that our search method outperforms the previous ones, in particular for large and real-world instances. Finally, we observe that the integrated approach is particularly effective when the planning horizon is short.