Master Surgical Scheduling via Answer Set Programming

The problem of finding a Master Surgical Schedule (MSS) consists of scheduling different specialties to the operating rooms (ORs) of a hospital clinic. To produce a proper MSS, each specialty must be assigned to some ORs, where the number of assignments is different for each specialty and can also vary during the considered planning horizon. The problem is enriched by considering resource availability such as beds, surgical teams and nurses. Realizing a satisfying schedule is of upmost importance for a hospital clinic, since a poorly scheduled MSS may lead to unbalanced specialties availability and increase patients’ waiting list, thus negatively affecting both the administrative costs of the hospital and the patient satisfaction. In this paper, we present compact solutions based on Answer Set Programming (ASP) to the MSS problem. We tested our solutions on different scenarios: experiments show that our ASP solutions provide satisfying results in short time, also when compared to other logic-based formalisms. Finally, we describe a web application we have developed for easy usage of our solution.