Surgical scheduling with antagonistic human resource objectives

Thibaud Monteiro, Nadine Meskens and Tao Wang

International Journal of Production Research, 2015, vol. 53, issue 24, 7434-7449

Abstract: Daily operating theatre scheduling is a complex problem with strong constraints and various objectives to optimise. In this article, we aim not only to optimise the classical objectives of scheduling performance, such as the makespan and the cost of overtime, but also, particularly, to upgrade human resource management performance by means of two additional objectives: a short-term objective on the quality of teamwork and a long-term objective on the level of nurses’ skills. The quality of teamwork depends on affinities between team members, which also have a significant impact on the quality and the safety of surgery. It maintains the unity of surgical teams. Such unity is however unfavourable to nurses’ skill diversification. In order to counterbalance this tendency, the long-term objective proposed is for nurses to acquire the widest possible spectrum of skills, in order to be able to assist surgeons in unplanned and emergency surgery. Taking into account these two antagonistic human resources objectives contributes to patient safety through better team building. It is the main originality of this work. In the long term, this method reduces the impact of this antagonism. In addition, we use the multi-objective ε -constraint method to obtain Pareto optimal solutions.

Date: 2015
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DOI: 10.1080/00207543.2015.1082040

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