ORTEC proudly secured 4th place in the 2024 Integrated Healthcare Timetabling Competition (IHTC), competing against 31 international teams comprising top academic institutions and private researchers. ORTEC was the highest-ranking corporate participant, underlining its unique combination of deep domain knowledge and practical solution design.
A Global Challenge in Healthcare Optimization
The IHTC is a renowned scientific competition focused on advancing innovative solutions for complex healthcare scheduling. Participants were challenged to create an integrated schedule that tackled three highly demanding optimization problems:
- Surgery planning
- Patient admission scheduling
- Nurse-to-room assignment
Each submission had to satisfy stringent hard constraints, such as patient gender, hospital room capacities, and staff limitations, while minimizing soft constraint penalties related to treatment delays, skill mismatches, and care continuity.
Wouter Kool, VP Research & AI at ORTEC and head of the IHTC team
"This achievement shows what’s possible when optimization expertise meets hands-on practicality. We’re proud to be among the top performers and to demonstrate our capabilities in healthcare logistics and scheduling."
Smart Modeling: ORTEC’s Optimization Approach
ORTEC’s approach combined smart heuristics, advanced modeling, and solver technology. A modular mixed-integer programming (MIP) model, built in Python using Pyomo and solved via Gurobi, formed the technical backbone of the solution. For large instances, the team decomposed the problem into sequential subproblems – beginning with patient admissions and ending with nurse scheduling – allowing for robust, efficient solution generation across all test cases.
The quality of ORTEC’s work was recognized during dedicated IHTC sessions at both the EURO 2025 conference in Leeds and the ORAHS 2025 conference in Trondheim, where experts praised the solution’s rigor and practical applicability.
This result strengthens ORTEC’s track record in global optimization competitions, having previously won the DIMACS Vehicle Routing Challenge and placed third in the ROADEF Loading Competition. It also further reinforces ORTEC’s long-standing ties with academia, where we actively contribute to applied research in AI and mathematical optimization.
Congratulations to the ORTEC team
Wouter Kool, Martijn van Brink, Charlie Ye, Eva van Rooijen, Judith Mourits, Per Kampman, and Lotte Berghman. Their collaboration and technical ingenuity reinforce ORTEC’s role as a trusted partner in healthcare optimization and complex scheduling solutions.
