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A survey on the applications of variable neighborhood search algorithm in healthcare management

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Abstract

This paper reviews the papers on the applications of VNS in the health care area by analyzing the characteristics of VNS in different problems. In the health care field, many complex optimization problems need to be tackled in a short time considering multiple influencing factors, such as personnel preferences, resources limitations, etc. As a metaheuristic, Variable neighborhood search (VNS) algorithm can get an approximate solution for the complex problem in a short time, and has been widely used to deal with the real-world health care optimization problems based on systematic neighborhood changes and perturbation operations when needed. We classify the found papers into five categories based on the topics, i.e., home health care problems, operating room problems, nurse rostering problems, routing optimization problems, and other topics. For each topic, the detailed operations of VNS and the differences in solving various problems have been discussed. In addition, we analyze the studied problems and summarize the approaches used in the literature. The application tendency of VNS in the health care area is also discussed at the end of the paper.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 72071057, 71922009, and 71690230), the Key research and development Projects in Anhui Province (1804b06020377), the Basic scientific research Projects in central colleges and Universities (JZ2018HGTB0232), and Innovative Research Groups of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71521001).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, 230009, China

    Shaowen Lan, Wenjuan Fan & Shanlin Yang

  2. Key Laboratory of Process Optimization and Intelligent Decision-making of Ministry of Education, Hefei, China

    Shaowen Lan, Wenjuan Fan & Shanlin Yang

  3. Center for Applied Optimization, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

    Panos M. Pardalos

  4. Department of Industrial Engineering, Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

    Nenad Mladenovic

  5. Ural Federal University, Yekaterinburg, Russia

    Nenad Mladenovic

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  1. Shaowen Lan
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  2. Wenjuan Fan
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  5. Nenad Mladenovic
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Correspondence to Wenjuan Fan.

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Lan, S., Fan, W., Yang, S. et al. A survey on the applications of variable neighborhood search algorithm in healthcare management. Ann Math Artif Intell 89, 741–775 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10472-021-09727-5

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