Reducing patient-flow delays in surgical suites through determining start-times of surgical cases

Sangbok Lee and Yuehwern Yih

European Journal of Operational Research, 2014, vol. 238, issue 2, 620-629

Abstract: A scheduling strategy to determine starting times of surgeries in multiple operating rooms (OR) is presented. The constraints are resource limit of a downstream facility, post-anesthesia care unit (PACU), and the service time uncertainties. Given sets of surgeries that need to be done on a day, this problem is formulated as a flexible job shop model with fuzzy sets. Patient-waitings in the process flow, clinical resource idling, and total completion times are considered for evaluation. This multi-objective problem is solved by a two-stage decision process. A genetic algorithm is used for determining relative order of surgeries in the first stage and definite starting times for all the surgical cases are obtained by a decision-heuristic in the second stage. The resultant schedule is evaluated by a Monte-Carlo simulation. The performance is shown to be better than our previous approach, a simulation based scheduling which already outperforms simple scheduling rules in regional hospitals. Additionally, the ratio of PACU to OR is examined using the proposed scheduling strategy.

Keywords: Surgery scheduling under uncertainty; Downstream resource constraint; Flexible job shop scheduling with time-lag; Multi-objective problem; Fuzzy sets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:238:y:2014:i:2:p:620-629

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2014.03.043

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