A two-phase heuristic approach to multi-day surgical case scheduling considering generalized resource constraints

The present contribution focuses on the problem of assigning and scheduling surgical cases in rooms of an operating theatre, in order to maximize efficiency. The aim is to schedule as many surgical cases in as few operating rooms as possible, within regular operating theatre opening hours and under limited resource availability. This work generalizes many surgical case scheduling aspects considered in the literature and in practice by means of a unified resource model. The performance of a heuristic algorithm designed for this rich problem formulation is evaluated and compared on a set of real-world data. Computational results demonstrate the potential improvements obtained by using the presented approach, over schedules constructed by human planners.