Surgical scheduling with simultaneous employment of specialised human resources

• Published in: European journal of operational research Vol. 245; no. 3; pp. 719 - 730
• Main Authors: Silva, Thiago A.O., de Souza, Mauricio C., Saldanha, Rodney R., Burke, Edmund K.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 16.09.2015; Elsevier Sequoia S.A
• Subjects: Assignment problem; Heuristic; Hospital administration; Integer programming; Mathematical modelling; Relax-and-fix heuristics; Studies; Surgery; Surgical scheduling; Workforce planning; Surgical scheduling; Relax-and-fix heuristics; Mathematical modelling
• ISSN: 0377-2217; 1872-6860
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2015.04.008

•We address surgery scheduling and resources assignment in an operating theatre.•We detail the treatment of specialised human resources in a practical case.•An individual of a speciality can perform more than one surgery simultaneously.•We give a formulation of the problem and develop integer programming heuristics.•We report numerical results on a number of scenarios inspired by real data. Surgical scheduling is a challenging problem faced by hospital managers. It is subject to a wide range of constraints depending upon the particular situation within any given hospital. We deal with the simultaneous employment of specialised human resources, which must be assigned to surgeries according to their skills as well as the time windows of the staff. A particular feature is that they can be assigned to two surgeries simultaneously if the rooms are compatible. The objective is to maximise the use of the operating rooms. We propose an integer model and integer programming based heuristics to address the problem. Computational experiments were conducted on a number of scenarios inspired by real data to cover different practical problem solving situations. Numerical results show that relaxations provide tight upper bounds, and relax-and-fix heuristics are successful in finding optimal or near optimal solutions.