Multi-Objective Simulation-Based Optimization for Effective Management of the Outpatient Chemotherapy Process

Outpatient chemotherapy departments' operational harmony depends on the proper strategic, tactical, and operational decisions. The integrated consideration of capacity dimensioning, resources planning, scheduling policy, appointment planning, scheduling, and resources-to-patients assignment can improve the outpatient chemotherapy process's (OCP) overall performance due to interdependencies. However, developing a comprehensive and stochastic OCP decision support system is complex. Thus, the planning, scheduling, and assignment problems are rarely addressed together. Therefrom, a multi-objective simulation-based optimization approach is proposed in this paper to handle the various OCP challenges. The proposed approach showed superior performance compared to a baseline using real data from an outpatient chemotherapy center.