Operations research applies not only to scheduling surgical procedures (see the previous article), but also to many other situations in healthcare.
The two problems discussed in this article are each modeled by two disjoint sets. They differ in the type of relation defined for each pair consisting of one element from each set, which can take several forms:
\- a weight function that assigns a numerical value or a ranking; for this type of problem, the Hungarian algorithm finds the perfect matching with the maximum or minimum total weight, as appropriate;
\- a preference list or ranking; each element of either set ranks the elements of the other set, so the relationship is specified by a pair of preference rankings.
The two types of assignment
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