Artificial bee colony algorithm for operating room scheduling problem with dedicated/flexible resources and cooperative operations

In this study operating room scheduling (ORS) problem is addressed in multi-resource manner. In the addressed problem, besides operating rooms (ORs) and surgeons, the anesthesia team is also considered as an additional resource. The surgeon(s) who will perform the operation have already been assigned to the patients and is a dedicated resource. The assignment of the anesthesia team has been considered as a decision problem and a flexible resource. In this study, cooperative operations are also considered. A mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model is proposed for the problem. Since the problem is NP-hard, an artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is proposed for the problem. The solutions of the ABC are compared with the MILP model and random search.