Mechanism Design For Operation Room Scheduling Considering Surgeons' Time Preferences

As the core department of the hospital,the operation department is one of the most intensive medical resources units.Rational planning and scheduling of the operating room and related resources is an urgent problem in hospital management,which has an important impact on the economic and social benefits of the hospital.Operating room scheduling needs to adopt different scheduling methods according to the surgical needs of different types of patients.Among them,the operation time of elective patients is relatively flexible,and the surgeon can make an appointment for the operation time from the operating room manager in advance.When a surgeon makes an appointment,they may ask the manager to schedule their surgeries at specific times in order to balance their schedules of multiple tasks.The manager needs to take into account the time requirements or preferences of all surgeons and other scheduling constraints for decision-making.Surgeons' time preferences include their availabilities and preferences for different time intervals.Traditional operating room scheduling usually assumes that the availability information of surgeons is known.However,in some cases,due to the cost of information collection and other restrictions,it is difficult to obtain the complete time availability information of surgeons.Moreover,surgeons have different preferences for different time intervals.Under this distributed environment,traditional centralized scheduling optimization method is no longer applicable,which brings new challenges to operating room scheduling.The operation room manager needs to consult with surgeons about their availabilities when scheduling.The manager can ask the surgeon to provide the availability information and give feedback after considering all the requests;the manager can also give alternative plans,which are then selected by surgeons based on their time preferences.However,in order to maximize their benefits and be allocated to their preferred time intervals,surgeons may not be willing to provide their complete availability information.When the manager provides alternatives for surgeons to choose,the content and quality of alternatives and the way to integrate the preferences of surgeons need to be considered.This thesis considers surgeons' availabilities as their private information and gives further consideration of the strategies surgeons may take to be allocated to their expected time intervals as self-interest decision makers.And we study how to design effective mechanisms in order to automatically elicit necessary time preference information of surgeons under this setting,so as to make the interaction between managers and surgeons more efficient.When it is necessary to take measures to coordinate the time preferences of different surgeons,we study how to integrate them so as to obtain scheduling results in line with the time preferences of most surgeons more efficiently.The main research contents are as follows.(1)Research on operation room resource scheduling considering surgeons' time preferences.In view of the background of distributed scheduling considering surgeon's private information,besides centralized scheduling optimization,strategic behaviors of self-interest surgeons in submitting available time information is also considered.In order to obtain a high quality schedule while effectively protecting surgeon's private information,an iterative auction mechanism is proposed to solve the problem.In the mechanism,surgeons bid strategically according to their availability information.When the termination conditions of the bidding procedure are not satisfied the winner determination model that considers operation room eligibility is applied to select the winner until the termination conditions are satisfied.We prove that myopic bidding strategy is a weak dominant strategy for surgeons under the proposed mechanism.We give an experiment in order to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed iterative bidding mechanism and discuss its application in reality.(2)Research on surgical scheduling considering surgeons' time preferences and multiple resources restrictions.Considering the restriction of surgeon's availability and other renewable resources,the scheduling problem with conflicting multiple resource requirements under surgeons' private availability is studied.Considering the strategic behavior of surgeons when submitting availability information,a combinatorial auction mechanism is applied to solve the problem,the objective is to maximize the sum of the weights of surgeries.In the mechanism,surgeons bid using the requirement-based bid structure to express the resource requirements of different surgeries and the available time requirements.In the bidding process,when the termination conditions are not satisfied,the resource constraint model is constructed to select the winner.We present a dominant strategy of surgeons under the proposed mechanism.Experiments show that the proposed mechanism achieves high efficiency compared with the optimal solution under different supply-demand ratios,while the privacy loss rate decreases with the increase of the ratios.(3)Research on master surgical scheduling considering surgeons' time preferences.The specialty scheduling considering different time preferences of surgeons is studied in which the availability of surgeons is their private information.In order to coordinate the time preferences of different surgeons between and within specialties,voting and scheduling optimization are combined to solve the problem.The objective is to maximize overall surgeons' satisfaction under the condition of maximizing operating room utilization.In the voting mechanism,the manager negotiates with the surgeon by giving alternative plans,and surgeons choose alternatives in a prescribed way to express their time preferences.In order to ensure the quality of the final schedule,the scheduling model that maximizes the manager's objectives is constructed to obtain the alternative scheduling plans.Considering the time preference and different weight of surgeons,weighted approved voting method and weighted borda voting method are adopted as voting rules.We analyze the advantages and disadvantages of these two methods and prove some properties.The experiment compares the results of the two methods obtained and discusses the influence of the number of alternatives on the results.We also discuss the application of the proposed method in practice.This thesis is studied based on the theories of economics,computational science and scheduling optimization.which provides new ideas for the research of related healthcare scheduling problems.In the thesis,we study the operating room scheduling problem considering surgeons' time preference and adopt cooperation or coordination mechanism to solve the problem.It provides a new way for the interaction between the manager and surgeons,and is helpful to improve scheduling efficiency,reduce labor costs and the complexity of multilateral negotiation.