Exploration of (De-)centralising Scheduling in an Emergency Department

The choice of decision structure with a more or lesser degree of (de-) centralisation is important since it affects the operation and decision-making process of enterprises in uncertain situations. The Emergency Department (ED) is the critical and main part of the hospital. There are various crucial decisions to be taken quickly under uncertainty and constraints in EDs, including resource scheduling. The exploration of the decision structure is required to improve the patients’ pathway. This article explores the (de-)centralisation of decision, i.e.,  centralised and decentralised models of nurse-to-patient scheduling in EDs. We base our centralised scheduling on a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP), and our decentralised scheduling makes a multi-agent system run a Contract Net Protocol (CNP) in which the agents locally optimise a variant of this MILP. We assess and compare both models. The result shows that both models generate similar patients’ schedules.