An Operating Theatre Planning and Scheduling Problem in the Case of an “Open Scheduling” Strategy

摘要

Among all sectors of a hospital, the operating theatre always draws the most attention of hospital managers because it is one of the most important and expensive sectors. Due to the constraint of budgets, resource-allocation issue has been recognized as a common problem in health-care organizations, and actually it is significant to operating theatre as well. In this paper, we focus on an operating theatre planning and scheduling problem in the case of an “open scheduling” strategy. In other words, we aim at assigning a set of surgical cases to an operating theatre, where both operating rooms and recovery beds of the recovery room are multifunctional, during one week by minimizing the operating cost and maximizing the utilization of operating theatre. First of all, an overview of the operating theatre planning and scheduling problem is provided, and then a mathematic model is constructed to solve that problem with a column-generation-based heuristic procedure. Afterwards, the daily scheduling problem is treated based on the results from the weekly planning problem. After solving all daily scheduling problems with the proposed hybrid genetic algorithm, we will get a feasible weekly operating program for the concerned operating theatre. At the end of this paper, a set of examples, in which data are randomly generated, are tested in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed method, and the results obtained in the case of an open scheduling strategy are compared with those obtained in the case of a block scheduling strategy is also done.