A room-oriented artificial bee colony algorithm for optimizing the patient admission scheduling problem.

Patient admission scheduling (PAS) is a tasking combinatorial optimization problem where a set of patients is assigned to limited facilities such as rooms, timeslots, and beds subject to satisfying a set of predefined constraints. The investigations into the performance of population-based algorithms that utilized to tackle the PAS problem considered in this paper reveal their weaknesses in obtaining quality solutions that create a space to investigate the performance of another population-based method. Thus, in this paper, an Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm (ABC) is proposed to tackle the formulation of the PAS problem under consideration.