Marwa Khalfalli, Fouad Ben Abdelaziz and Hichem Kamoun
The purpose of this paper is to generate a daily operating theater schedule aiming to minimize completion time and maximum overtime while integrating real-life surgeon…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to generate a daily operating theater schedule aiming to minimize completion time and maximum overtime while integrating real-life surgeon constraints, such as their role, specialty, qualification and availability.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper deals with complete surgery process using multi-objective surgery scheduling approach. Furthermore, the combinatorial nature of the studied problem does not allow to solve it to optimality. Therefore, the authors developed two approaches embedded in a tabu search metaheuristic, namely, weighted sum and e-constraint, to minimize completion time and maximum overtime.
Findings
The integration of the upstream and downstream services of an intervention and the consideration of the specific constraints related to surgeons are very essential to obtaining more closed schedules to the realty.
Practical implications
The paper includes implications for the development of efficient schedules for a significant number of operations coming from different specialties throughout its complete surgery process under multi-resource constraints.
Social implications
The paper can help hospital managers and decision makers to well manage the budget by minimizing the overtime cost and by offering efficient daily operating theater schedule.
Originality/value
The results of the paper will help hospital managers and decision makers to well manage the budget by minimizing the overtime cost and offering efficient daily operating theater schedule.
Details
Keywords
Abdelaziz Dammak, Abdelkarim Elloumi and Hichem Kamoun
This paper aims to consider the exam timetabling of the re‐sit session in the Faculty of Economics and Management Sciences of Sfax. The objective is to find a timetable which…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to consider the exam timetabling of the re‐sit session in the Faculty of Economics and Management Sciences of Sfax. The objective is to find a timetable which minimizes the number of timeslots for exams required by the enrolled students.
Design/methodology/approach
Two heuristic procedures based on graph colouring are developed and tested on real data to solve the exam timetabling problem at the faculty.
Findings
These heuristics were tested on a simple example which shows the out‐performance of the second heuristic compared with the first one. When tested with the real data of the faculty, exam size heuristic provides a timetable with a shorter timeframe; however, the timetable obtained from the second heuristic is of better quality.
Originality/value
The main contribution of this paper is to create an automated exam timetabling that helps the faculty to manage its own enterprise system.