Radiotherapy Scheduling

This chapter concerns radiotherapy scheduling problems identified at two cancer centres in the UK. The scheduling of radiotherapy pretreatment and treatment appointments is a complex problem due to various medical and scheduling constraints, such as patient category, machine availability, a doctors’ rota, waiting time targets (i.e., the time when a patient should receive the first radiotherapy fraction, etc.), and, also, due to the size of the problem (i.e., number of machines, facilities and patients). Different objectives need to be considered including minimisation of the number of patients who do not meet their waiting time targets, minimisation of usage of overtime slots, minimisation of machines idle time, and so on. Motivated by heuristics developed for production scheduling problems, two novel heuristics-based approaches to scheduling of radiotherapy patients are developed. Both approaches involve priority rules; while one of the approaches applies the a priori selected priority rules, the other one employs a genetic algorithm (GA) to select priority rules which will lead to the best scheduling performance. Different experiments are carried out to analyse the performance of the two radiotherapy scheduling approaches.