Routing heterogeneous mobile hospital with different patients priorities: Hyper-heuristic approach

Telemedicine, which is the use of technologies in order to provide clinical health care at a distance, can be insufficient in some cases where there is a need for medical instruments. This implies the need for supplementary services that would provide to overcome some of the deficiencies. Thus, many techniques were proposed, one of them is to dispatch the so-called Mobile Hospital (MH). This study centers around dispatching and scheduling of dispatched MHs. We aim at allocation and scheduling of MHs to serve patients at their locations given that every patient has its priority in receiving services and the provided service for each patient needs an a priori known time slot. In this study, we propose a hyper-heuristic solution method, which includes several low-level heuristics categorized as constructive, improvement, perturbation etc. coordinated via an artificial intelligent method. Our computational results confirm the efficiency of our solution in terms of solution quality and time.