Patients Transportation in Surgery Scheduling Problem

The scheduling problem in surgery is difficult because, in addition of the planning of the operating rooms which are the most expensive resources in hospitals, each surgery requires a combination of human and material resources. In this paper, the authors address a surgery scheduling problem which arises in operated health care facility. Moreover, the authors consider simultaneously materiel and human resources. This problem is a three-stages flow shop scheduling environment. The first stage (ward) contains a limited number of resources of the same type (beds); The second stage contains different resources with limited capacity (operating rooms, surgeons, nurses, anesthesiologists) and the third stage contains a limited number of recovery beds. There is also a limited number of transporters (porters) between the ward and the other stages. The objective of the problem is to minimize the completion time of the last patient (makespan). the authors formulate this NP-Hard problem in a mixed integer programming model and conduct computational experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed model.