On solving the integrated operating room planning and scheduling problem

Abstract

This paper deals with the operating room planning and scheduling problem. It consists of (i) assigning a surgery date and an operating room to a set of patients to be operated on over a given planning horizon and (ii) sequencing the selected patients in each operating room and day. Our objective is to find an optimal schedule that minimizes the maximum closing time of the operating rooms. To solve the resulting problem, we propose to use a Genetic Algorithm (GA) since it is very effective at finding optimal solutions to a wide variety of such complex problems. To evaluate the performance of the proposed GA in terms of quality of solutions and computation time, we initiate a preliminary analysis on a set of problem instances. The results prove that GA can guarantee to find a high-quality feasible solution for some problem instances. However, for other problem instances, a near-optimal solution becomes more difficult to be found. These primary results motivate us to conduct additional efforts to undertake some observed shortages and develop an improved version of the existing genetic algorithm model.