Online scheduling for a hadrontherapy treatment center

For a Carbon-ion therapy center in the design phase, patient recruitment is one of the most important challenges that involve healthcare laws and regulations, financial management, and technical concepts. Numerous constraints related to tumor treatment protocols, priority assignment, decision making and capacity analysis should be taken into account. The main objective of this research work is to identify better admission criteria that drive improved performance and optimized efficiency in the Carbon-ion therapy center. A decision support tool has been developed through constraint programming to optimize patient recruitment, which particularly belongs to online scheduling problems. Being given periodically a list of admission demands characterized by latest beginning day, treatment priority, and number of therapy sessions with their durations, this tool is capable to generate an optimized admission list according to capacity schedule and aiming at increasing economic efficiency. The generated admission list is useful not only for planning treatment activities in the center, but also for regulating both domestic and international demands.