Assigning surgery cases to operating rooms: A VNS approach for leveling ward beds occupancies

This paper deals with the problem of scheduling over a given planning horizon a set of elective surgery patients into a set of available operating room block times. The aim is to level the post-surgery ward bed occupancies during the days, thus allowing a smooth workload in the ward and, as a consequence, an improved quality of care provided to patients. Exploiting the flexibility of the Variable Neighbourhood Search, we provide a general solution framework which we show could be easily adapted to different operative contexts.