Research in timetabling often focuses on clear-cut academic problems. Real-world healthcare optimization problems, however, encompass additional challenges due to various decision and optimization problems being intertwined. Moreover, general timetabling methodologies are not necessarily suitable for addressing such integrated problems. In the interest of stimulating research on the specifics of integrated scheduling problems in healthcare, this paper introduces the Integrated Healthcare Timetabling Competition 2024 We begin by describing the problem formulation, which integrates three critical problems in healthcare: surgical case planning, patient admission scheduling and nurse-to-room assignment. Next, we discuss the data sets and file formats, along with the solution checker (validator) that we provide for the participants. Finally, we state the rules of the competition and explain how participants will be ranked. All up-to-date information concerning the competition is available at the competition’s website https://ihtc2024.github.io.
S. et al. (Mon,) studied this question.