Abstract
In intravenous infusion and feeding, it is necessary to select an appropriate combination of commercially available bottles which satisfy requirements of a patient with various disturbances of body fluid and nutritional state. However, the solution of the bottle selection problem cannot be achieved practically by the usual search technique because of the combinatorial nature of the problem. By applying the implicit enumeration method of integer programming we have been able to find an optimal solution in a huge number of possible combination of bottles in an acceptable short time. The program was written in standard Pascal for HP 1000 minicomputer system. The algorithm proposed in this study appears to have advantages over the previously published algorithms on the following points: (1) For any set of bottles, an optimal combination can be found on the basis of ‘optimality’ as defined by the user; (2) The computation time is acceptable even when the number of both constituents and types of bottles is as large as fifteen.
We tested the bottle selection system on 723 hypothetical cases of dehydration and on 21 representative cases of pathological nutrition. The validity and practicality of the algorithm have been confirmed.
