Abstract
Scheduling patient appointments at a hemodialysis center is a unique challenge, unlike other healthcare appointment scheduling problems. Patients require a series of dialysis treatment sessions rather than a single appointment. We formulate this multiple-appointment system as a set-partitioning model and solve it using a branch-and-price algorithm. Since dynamic programming doesn't perform very well for solving the pricing subproblem, we further decompose it and solve it using a novel column-generation-based approach. Additionally, we design a greedy heuristic to improve the computational efficiency of the algorithm.