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
Marwa Khalfalli, Fouad Ben Abdelaziz, Jerome Verny and Meryem Masmoudi
Operating theaters are considered as the most sensitive health department within hospital centers due to their significant cost/necessity for patients and their economic benefits…
Abstract
Purpose
Operating theaters are considered as the most sensitive health department within hospital centers due to their significant cost/necessity for patients and their economic benefits for hospitals. In this paper, the authors consider patients that may require more than one surgery on the same day in the surgery scheduling problem which is a major technology enhancement in the health industry.
Design/methodology/approach
The surgery scheduling includes both the preoperative and the postoperative units of the operative stage. Two objectives are considered in a lexicographic way: the minimization of the makespan while prioritizing the patients having two surgeries and the total completion time to perform. An adapted tabu-search algorithm is used to tackles this NP-hard scheduling problem.
Findings
The proposed schedule is more relevant for operating theaters as it integrates all stages of the surgical procedure and considers patients with more than one operation during the same day.
Originality/value
This paper is original as it considers patients who need more than one operation, which responds to real challenge faced by decision-makers' in hospitals. The application of the time lags between stages of the surgical procedure generates a good utilization of the hospital resources and makes the scheduling task more flexible.