Psychological Acceptability Weighted Priority Scheduling: A Case Study of Animal Hospital

A solution to the patient scheduling problem for a case study animal hospital called Mix+Factor scheduling is proposed in this work. Mix scheduling is based on the weighted sum of patient arrival order, the job type and the priority. The priority is based on the veterinarian opinion on the treatment type. Factor is an additional function based on the psychological acceptability of the patient owners in allowing some later jobs to be moved ahead in the waiting queue. The experimental results are conducted on three synthesis workloads to create a light-load, normal-load and high-load conditions. The synthesis workloads are created according to the mixture of jobs at the case study animal hospital. The results show that the Mix+Factor algorithm provides similar or better average waiting time performance in comparison with the currently used algorithms, namely First-Come-First-Served. In addition, Mix+Factor can also provide a better scheduling in order to reduce the waiting time for specific patients such as violence animals or patients with appointments. A study on potential benefit of opening an extra treatment room shows that an extra treatment room can significantly reduce the waiting time and better serve the specific patients than that of the currently used algorithm.