Surgical Scheduling Under Service Time Constraints

Optimizing surgical scheduling can help to eliminate the bottleneck in hospitals' development resulted from limited operating rooms and increasing surgical patients. Surgical scheduling is affected by various service time constraints including surgical duration and setup time. In most papers, the surgical duration and setup time are assumed to be fixed. However, with the accumulation of medical teams'experience and deterioration of patients, the actual surgical duration and setup time are usually unfixed. Moreover, the effect on surgical duration resulting from the accumulation of medical teams'experience is also limited. Besides, most researchers only take the setup time between medical teams into account, ignoring the one between consecutive surgeries. In order to insure timely completion of surgeries, other service time constraints including the ready time of medical teams and due dates of surgeries should also be considered in surgical scheduling. For this reason, the paper investigates the surgical scheduling with various service time constraints including the surgical duration, setup time, ready time of medical teams and due dates of surgeries, distinguishing the setup time between medical teams and the one between consecutive surgeries. Furthermore, the truncated learning effect and deteriorating effect in surgical duration and setup time are also considered.In the chapter 1, the classification, representation methods and solving methods of surgical scheduling problems are introduced. Compared with traditional job scheduling problems, the newly achievements in surgical scheduling problems are reviewed, involving the surgical duration, setup time, ready time of medical teams and due dates of surgeries. Meanwhile, some similar job scheduling problems with job processing time, setup time, ready time of jobs and due dates are also introduced. Finally, a brief introduction of the whole paper is provided.In the chapter 2, with the service time constraints including surgical duration, setup time between medical teams and setup time between surgeries, a surgical scheduling problem which aims at minimizing the completion time of all the surgeries is studied. The truncated learning effect in surgical duration and the deteriorating effect in both surgical duration and setup time are considered in the model. A scheduling algorithm is presented to derive the optimal sequence for both the surgeries and medical teams, making the completion time minimized. Finally, by means of numerical simulation, the derived conclusions are verified.In the chapter 3, a surgical scheduling problem aiming at minimizing the maximum surgical tardiness is studied. The various ready time constraints of medical teams and due dates of surgeries are taken into consideration. The optimal sequence of surgeries is derived from the scheduling model. A branch-and-bound algorithm is further designed to get the optimal sequence of medical teams entering the operating room. At last, a set of numerical simulation is presented to verify the theoretical conclusions and display the process of formulating a surgical scheduling.In the chapter 4, a summary of the whole paper is presented.