Dynamic three-stage operating room scheduling considering patient waiting time and surgical overtime costs

Abstract

In this paper, we study a dynamic operating room scheduling problem which consists of three stages. The problem simultaneously tackles the capacity allocation of operating rooms to each specialty, assignment of operating rooms to surgeons, assignment and sequence of patients. To lower the total costs of operating rooms from both sides of patients and operating rooms, a mathematical model is proposed with objective of minimizing the patient waiting costs and operating room overtime costs. Some structural properties of the studied problem are proposed, and two heuristic algorithms are presented to solve the patient assignment problem based on these structural properties. The studied operating room scheduling problem is proved to be NP-hard, and a hybrid GWO-VNS algorithm combining Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) with Variable Neighbourhood Search (VNS) is developed to obtain a good solution, where the heuristic algorithms are incorporated. Finally, computational experiments are conducted to test the efficiency, stability, and convergence speed of the proposed algorithm and compared with other mainstream algorithms. The results show that our proposed algorithm outperforms the compared algorithms.