An integrated approach for surgery scheduling under uncertainty

• Published in: Computers & industrial engineering Vol. 118; pp. 1 - 8
• Main Authors: Wang, Jin, Guo, Hainan, Bakker, Monique, Tsui, Kwok-Leung
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Ltd 01.04.2018
• Subjects: Healthcare; Linear programming; Robust optimization; Surgery scheduling; Surgery scheduling; Healthcare; Linear programming; Robust optimization
• ISSN: 0360-8352; 1879-0550
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cie.2018.02.017

•Decisions on both block and surgery levels are considered.•An integrated approach is proposed to solve the model with uncertainty.•The policy by using the integrated approach is better than traditional ones.•It is shown that decisions on block level are related to costs on surgery level. Operating rooms (ORs) account for high costs in hospitals. A well-designed surgery scheduling system can help improve facility utilization, thus reduce the cost. This paper is concerned with a surgery scheduling problem in the context where the number of surgeries in waiting list is beyond the capacity of OR. A surgeon may perform more than one surgery a day, and the surgeries of a surgeon are scheduled consecutively, which form a block. A model is proposed to determine which surgeries should be performed in the coming workday, as well as the corresponding start time of each block. We propose an integrated approach by combining two existing methods, i.e., sample average approximation (SAA) and robust linear programming. The new approach eliminates the number of variables in SAA model, hence can be solved more efficiently. Experiments show that the computation time of our approach is approximately one quarter of that of SAA. Cost sensitivity analysis is provided.