Pattern-Based Online Algorithms for a General Patient-Centred Radiotherapy Scheduling Problem

A radiotherapy treatment consists in a given number of radiation sessions, one for each (working) day, which should start before a given due date. Patients are usually classified into classes of urgency having different deadlines and number of sessions. Waiting time is the main critical issue in the management of a radiotherapy health system. After deriving a general problem statement from the case studies reported in the literature, we present three online optimisation algorithms that try to exploit the particular structure of the solution, and we compare their results with two baseline online algorithms.