  Patient-to-room assignment (PRA) is a scheduling problem in decision support
for hospitals. It consists of assigning patients to rooms according to certain
objectives, e.g., avoiding transfers and respecting single-room requests. This
work presents combinatorial insights about the feasibility of PRA and about the
assignment of patients to single rooms. We further compare different
IP-formulations for PRA as well as the influence of different objectivs on the
runtime. Based on these results, we develop a fast IP-based solution approach
which obtains high quality solution. The applicability is verified through a
computational study with instances derived from real-world data. Results
indicate that large, real world instances can be solved to a high degree of
optimality within (fractions of) seconds.
