A survey on the applications of variable neighborhood search algorithm in healthcare management

This paper reviews the papers on the applications of VNS in the health care area by analyzing the characteristics of VNS in different problems. In the health care field, many complex optimization problems need to be tackled in a short time considering multiple influencing factors, such as personnel preferences, resources limitations, etc. As a metaheuristic, Variable neighborhood search (VNS) algorithm can get an approximate solution for the complex problem in a short time, and has been widely used to deal with the real-world health care optimization problems based on systematic neighborhood changes and perturbation operations when needed. We classify the found papers into five categories based on the topics, i.e., home health care problems, operating room problems, nurse rostering problems, routing optimization problems, and other topics. For each topic, the detailed operations of VNS and the differences in solving various problems have been discussed. In addition, we analyze the studied problems and summarize the approaches used in the literature. The application tendency of VNS in the health care area is also discussed at the end of the paper.