Integrated operating room planning and scheduling: an ILP-Based off-line approach for emergency responsiveness at a local hospital in Naples

This paper addresses a real-world Integrated Operating Room Planning and Scheduling (IORPS) problem encountered by a local hospital in Naples, characterized by stringent emergency management constraints, requiring treatment initiation within a 20-minute time-window. We tackle this problem by an original Integer Linear Programming formulation, capable of dealing with different operating room management strategies (open, block and block-modified). Our work differs from conventional cost-focused models by adopting a patient-oriented objective function, aligning with public hospitals obligations. The proposed method has been validated using real-world data provided by the hospital. The performed experimentation demonstrates the efficiency of the approach, capable of determining the optimal solution within an acceptable computation time that aligns with hospital requirements. Moreover, it also highlights the relevance of using our optimization approach to reduce delays in emergency responsiveness. This confirms its practical usage as a substitute for the current manual procedure.