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J. Maschler, M. Riedler, G. Raidl:
"Particle Therapy Patient Scheduling: Time Estimation to Schedule Sets of Treatments";
Talk: Computer Aided Systems Theory - EUROCAST 2017, Spain; 2017-02-19 - 2017-02-24; in: "Computer Aided Systems Theory - EUROCAST 2017", (2017), 106 - 107.

In classical radiotherapy cancer treatments are provided by linear accelerators
that serve a dedicated treatment room exclusively. In contrast, particle therapy
uses beams that are produced by either cyclotrons or synchrotrons that can serve
up to five treatment rooms in an interleaved way. Several sequential activities
like stabilization not requiring the beam have to be performed in the treatment
room before and after each actual irradiation. Using several rooms and switching
the beam between the rooms thus allows an effective utilization of the expensive
particle accelerator and increased throughput of the facility.
In a typical midterm planning scenario a schedule for performing the thera-
pies over the next few months has to be determined. Midterm planning for clas-
sical radiotherapy has already attracted some research starting with the works
from Kapamara et al. [1] and Petrovic et al. [3]. Due to the one-to-one corre-
spondence of treatment rooms and accelerators it suffices to consider a coarser
scheduling scenario in which treatments have to be assigned only to days but
do not have to be sequenced within the day. In a recent work [2] we studied a
simplified problem formulation addressing the midterm planning of the particle
therapy treatment center MedAustron in Wiener Neustadt, Austria, which of-
fers three treatment rooms. Our approach consisted in decomposing the problem
into a day assignment and a sequencing part, and we provided a construction
heuristic, a GRASP, and an Iterated Greedy (IG) metaheuristic. The aim of the
current work is to extend the proposed model and to provide and utilize a mech-
anism that quickly predicts the behavior of the sequencing part with reasonable
precision, allowing in particular an improved day assignment.

http://eurocast2017.fulp.ulpgc.es/sites/default/files/Eurocast_2017_Extended_Abstract_Book.pdf