Abstract
The operating room management problems are legion. This paper tackles the scheduling of surgical procedures in an operating theatre containing up to two operating rooms and two surgeons. We first solve a deterministic version that uses the constraint programming paradigm and then a stochastic version which embeds the former in a sample average approximation scheme. The latter produces more robust schedules that cope better with the surgeries’ time variability
Similar content being viewed by others
References
AIMMS-MOPTA (2013). Challenge operation room management under uncertainty. http://coral.ie.lehigh.edu/~mopta2013/competition.
Beliën, J. (2008). A branch-and-price approach for integrating nurse and surgery scheduling. European Journal of Operational Research, 189(3), 652–668. doi:10.1016/j.ejor.2006.10.060.
Berg, B., Denton, B., Nelson, H., Balasubramanian, H., Rahman, A., Bailey, A., & Lindor, K. (2009). A discrete event simulation model to evaluate operational performance of a colonoscopy suite. Medical Decision Making, 30(3), 380–387. doi:10.1177/0272989X09345890.
Birge, J.R., & Louveaux, F. (2011). Introduction to stochastic programming. In Springer Series in Operations Research and Financial Engineering. 2nd. New York: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-0237-4.
Cardoen, B., Demeulemeester, E., & Beliën, J. (2010). Operating room planning and scheduling: A literature review. European Journal of Operational Research, 201(3), 921–932. doi:10.1016/j.ejor.2009.04.011.
Demeulemeester, E., Beliën, J., Cardoen, B., & Samudra, M. (2013). Operating room planning and scheduling. In Handbook of healthcare operations management. Springer, pp. 121–152. doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-5885-2_5.
Gupta, D. (2003). A sequential bounding approach for optimal appointment scheduling. IIE Transactions, 35(11), 1003–1016. doi:10.1080/07408170304395.
Denton, B., Viapiano, J., & Vogl, A. (2007). Optimization of surgery sequencing and scheduling decisions under uncertainty. Health care management science, 10(1), 13–24. doi:10.1007/s10729-006-9005-4.
Dexter, F., & Traub, R.D. (2002). How to schedule elective surgical cases into specific operating rooms to maximize the efficiency of use of operating room time. Anesthesia & Analgesia, 94(4), 933–942. doi:10.1097/00000539-200204000-00030.
Dexter, F., Macario, A., & Traub, R.D. (1999). Which algorithm for scheduling add-on elective cases maximizes operating room utilization?: Use of bin packing algorithms and fuzzy constraints in operating room management. Anesthesiology, 91(5), 1491–1500. doi:10.1097/00000542-199911000-00043.
Guerriero, F., & Guido, R. (2011). Operational research in the management of the operating theatre: a survey. Health care management science, 14(1), 89–114. doi:10.1007/s10729-010-9143-6.
Guinet, A., & Chaabane, S. (2003). Operating theatre planning. International Journal of Production Economics, 85 (1), 69–81. doi:10.1016/S0925-5273(03)00087-2.
Hanset, A., Meskens, N., & Duvivier, D. (2010). Using constraint programming to schedule an operating theatre. In IEEE Workshop on Health Care Management (WHCM), IEEE (pp. 1–6). doi:10.1109/WHCM.2010.5441245.
Harper, P.R. (2002). A Framework for Operational Modelling of Hospital Resources. Health Care Management Science, 5(3), 165–173. doi:10.1023/A:1019767900627.
Huschka, T.R., Denton, B., Gul, S., & Fowler, J.W. (2007). Bi-criteria evaluation of an outpatient procedure center via simulation. In Winter Simulation Conference, IEEE (pp. 1510–1518). doi:10.1109/WSC.2007.4419764
Kleywegt, A.J., Shapiro, A., & Homem-de Mello, T. (2002). The sample average approximation method for stochastic discrete optimization. SIAM Journal on Optimization, 12(2), 479–502. doi:10.1137/S1052623499363220.
Min, D., & Yih, Y. (2010). Scheduling elective surgery under uncertainty and downstream capacity constraints. European Journal of Operational Research, 206(3), 642–652. doi:10.1016/j.ejor.2010.03.014.
MHallah, R., & Al-Roomi, A. (2014). The planning and scheduling of operating rooms: A simulation approach. Computers & Industrial Engineering, 78, 235–248. doi:10.1016/j.cie.2014.07.022.
Pham, D.N., & Klinkert, A. (2008). Surgical case scheduling as a generalized job shop scheduling problem. European Journal of Operational Research, 185(3), 1011–1025. doi:10.1016/j.ejor.2006.03.059.
Saadouli, H., Jerbi, B., Dammak, A., Masmoudi, L., & Bouaziz, A. (2015). A stochastic optimization and simulation approach for scheduling operating rooms and recovery beds in an orthopedic surgery department. Computers & Industrial Engineering, 80, 72–79. doi:10.1016/j.cie.2014.11.021.
Sier, D., Tobin, P., & McGurk, C. (1997). Scheduling surgical procedures. The Journal of the Operational Research Society, 48(9), 884–891. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jors.2600441.
van Houdenhoven, M., van Oostrum, J.M., Hans, E.W., Wullink, G., & Kazemier, G. (2007). Improving operating room efficiency by applying bin-packing and portfolio techniques to surgical case scheduling. Anesthesia & Analgesia, 105(3), 707–714. doi:10.1213/01.ane.0000277492.90805.0f.
World Bank (2011). Health expenditure, total (% of Gross Domestic Product). http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.TOTL.ZS/countries/1W-US?display=graph.
Acknowledgments
We sincerely thank Etienne Beauchamp, Polytechnique Montréal, for all the work he has provided during the implementation of the model in AIMMS. We would like to thank Professor Louis-Martin Rousseau, Polytechnique Montréal, for his support.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Gauthier, J.B., Legrain, A. Operating room management under uncertainty. Constraints 21, 577–596 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10601-015-9236-4
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10601-015-9236-4