Local search heuristics for a surgical case assignment problem

Publication date: June 2018Source: Operations Research for Health Care, Volume 17Author(s): Catarina Mateus, Inês Marques, M. Eugénia CaptivoAbstractThis work is part of an ongoing project with a Portuguese public hospital, where the elective surgeries scheduling problem is studied. The administration of the hospital aims to achieve the targets set by the Portuguese Ministry of Health for surgical production and to ensure a surgical service with a high level of efficiency. However, hospitals do not have an elective surgeries scheduling system, so the surgeries are unsystematically scheduled and without respecting equity criteria, thus disregarding the Ministry’s goals.Three versions of the problem are considered and local search heuristics are developed in order to quickly find good solutions for each version of the problem. The heuristics select patients from a long waiting list for surgery to be scheduled in each week, and define a room, a day and a shift for each selected surgery according to one of three different perspectives of the problem.The heuristics developed are tested in real instances and the values of the solutions are compared with the values of the solutions obtained using mixed integer linear programming models. The solutions obtained by the heuristics are of very good quality and the computational time required is generally quite low, even considering the instances with more surgeries in the waiting list.In addition, a user-friendly interface is created...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research