Scheduling of elective operations with coordinated utilization of hospital beds and operating rooms

Abstract

The problem studied in this paper is elective surgery scheduling, with resource constraints in each of the three following stages: preoperative, perioperative, and postoperative stages. With the integrated availability of hospital beds in wards and operating rooms, the aim is to determine operation start times of surgeries and allocate the hospital beds to patients while getting patients treated as soon as possible. This task is crucial in providing timely treatments for the patients while ensuring the hospital’s resource utilization balance. For the problem, we first formulate it as mixed-integer programming, which is NP-complete. Then, we propose several heuristics to overcome the long computation time. To make the solution better, we also propose improved algorithms. Finally, we conduct a series of numerical studies to illustrate the efficiency of our proposed algorithms and examine the impact of the number of jobs, beds, and surgery blocks on the performance measure. Computational experiments showed the superior performance of our heuristics in makespan.