Bicriteria elective surgery scheduling using an evolutionary algorithm

Current social and economic environment forces better practices among health care service organizations. Portuguese National Health Plan outlines the urgency of improving the efficiency of the health care systems installed capacity, and reducing the waiting lists for surgery. This work aims to contribute to these objectives by developing a bicriteria optimization methodology that allows to streamline the surgery scheduling problem at a Lisbon public hospital. An evolutionary algorithm to approximate the set of non-dominated solutions of this bicriteria optimization problem is presented. Tests performed using hospital data show a good performance of the algorithm proposed. Instances with 508 to 2306 elective surgeries are solved in less than 80 seconds. A very good representation of the Pareto front was achieved thus providing the opportunity to implement a better decision-making process at the hospital. This study presents a powerful method with potential to improve the delivery of surgical activity in the hospital under study.