We present a detailed analysis of the patient and resource scheduling problem in rehabilitation hospitals. In practice, the predominantly therapeutical treatments and activities which are prescribed for the patients are typically scheduled manually.This leads to rigid and inefficient schedules which can have negative effects on the quality of care and the patients' satisfaction. We outline the conceptual framework of a decision support system for the scheduling process that is based on formal optimization models. To this end, we first develop a large-scale monolithic optimization model. Then we derive a numerically tractable hierarchical model system in order to deal with problem instances of realistic sizes. We report numerical results with respect to solution times, model sizes and solution quality.

The transportation processes for patients, personnel, and material in large and complex maximum-care hospitals with many departments can consume significant resources and thus induce substantial logistics costs. These costs are largely determined by the allocation of the different departments and wards in possibly multiple connected hospital buildings. We develop a hierarchical layout planning approach based on an analysis of organizational and operational data from the Hannover Medical School, a large and complex university hospital in Hannover, Germany.The purpose of this approach is to propose locations for departments and wards for a given system of buildings such that the consumption of resources due to those transportation processes is minimized. We apply the approach to this real-world organizational and operational dataset as well as to a fictitious hospital building and analyze the algorithmic behavior and resulting layout.

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