An operating theatre planning and scheduling problem in the case of a "block scheduling" strategy

Operating theatre is always the most important and expensive sector of the hospital, and its surgical process management problem is always regarded as the kernel. In this paper, we focus on one of the surgical process management problems: block scheduling problem. An efficient weekly operating program is built for an operating theatre through two phases: at first the operating theatre weekly planning problem is solved with a heuristic procedure based on column generation procedure; then the operating theatre daily scheduling problem, based on the results from the first phase, is solved with a hybrid genetic algorithm. In the end, the proposed problem is tested and validated with randomly generated data, and then the numerical results are provided