A genetic algorithm for dynamic scheduling in emergency departments with priorities

A hospital is a very complex environment and its management is a hard task. The point we explore in this thesis is the management of the patient flow for the Emergency Department. The main contribution of the thesis is twofold: on the one hand, we design a model of the Emergency Department as close as possible to the real environment; on the other hand, we design a genetic algorithm for finding the optimal schedule of patients’ care. The choice of this approach is due to both the dynamic nature of the environment and the tight constraints on computational time, which favour the use of an any-time algorithm. We show through simulation that the model is sound and that the genetic algorithm is effective for the scheduling problem and could be easily applied to a real Emergency Department