A Decision Support System for Operating Room scheduling

• We present a Decision Support System for OR scheduling.
• We propose an MILP model and several heuristics to address the decision problem.
• We describe the advantages and results obtained from the implementation of the DSS.

In this paper we present a Decision Support System (DSS) for surgery scheduling which is currently in use in several Surgical Units in one of the largest hospitals in Spain. This system embeds a number of optimization procedures (both exact and approximate) to support decisions related to the assignment of dates and Operating Rooms to the interventions of patients in a waiting list. The system is capable of producing a medium-term – i.e. up to six months – plan in order to estimate the week in which each patient would be intervened, so that the material and human resources needed for their intervention can be arranged. A short-term (two weeks) plan can be obtained to determine optimal or quasi-optimal intervention dates taking into account the surgical resources, patients’ availability, as well as a number of specific constraints and features imposed by the Hospital’s Managers (such as e.g. the maximum number of ORs in which a surgeon can intervene within a shift). The proposed DSS allows users to manually modify the plans in order to adapt them to last-minute changes via an interactive graphical user interface. The system has been successfully employed for surgery scheduling.