The Integrated Healthcare Timetabling competition 2024

Real-world timetabling problems in healthcare usually encompass several interdependent optimization problems. Despite their practical importance and the existence of algorithms for solving subproblems that compose these ‘integrated’ problems, there are no methodologies or guidelines for addressing them adequately. In the interest of stimulating research on these relevant integrated optimization problems, the authors prepared a computational challenge focusing on the Integrated Healthcare Timetabling Problem. In 2024, they launched an international competition associated with this original problem: the Integrated Healthcare Timetabling Competition. The scientific initiative can be called a success with respect to several criteria. The competition attracted a large number of participants from both industry and academia, leading to 32 teams submitting their computational results. Interestingly, the participants developed a diverse set of complementary algorithmic approaches, with several smart ideas to restrict the huge solution space or speed up the computations. This paper introduces the Integrated Healthcare Timetabling Competition’s statement, along with its regulations and datasets. It additionally reports the progress, participants’ submissions and results. All generated knowledge remains available to boost future scientific investigation, algorithm development and applications.