Robust bi-objective operating rooms scheduling problem regarding the shared resources

In recent years, many efforts have been made to provide different strategies for enhancing the scheduling and planning of the operating rooms. The efficient planning and scheduling of ORs is a complex task since it has to account for the availability of human resources, medical equipment, and medication required for each surgery but that are often shared between different ORs. This paper proposes a mathematical approach to enhance the management of OR resources. It presents a bi-objective robust optimization approach for scheduling the surgeries in the ORs and recovery room, regarding the uncertainty of the surgery time, uncertainty of hospitalization time in the recovery room, and shared resources. The first objective function aims to minimize the maximum completion time of the surgeries and the second one minimizes the sum of the earliness-tardiness of the surgical operations. The suggested approach utilizes the multi-choice goal programming approach with utility function to solve the proposed model. The proposed approach is applied to a real case in the Shahid Beheshti hospital, Babol, Iran. The obtained results show that the suggested bi-objective robust optimization approach can enhance OR scheduling and should be designed into a decision support system for OR management.