Building Cyclic Master Surgery Schedules with Leveled Resulting Bed Occupancy : A Case Study

This paper describes a case study in which a number of optimization algorithms are applied in order to build a cyclic master surgery schedule with leveled resulting bed occupancy. The study starts from detailed information on all elective surgery interventions during a 1-year period in a medium-sized Belgian hospital. For each surgeon-hospitalization unit combination multinomial distribution functions are derived for both the number of operated patients per operating room block and the length of stay of each operated patient. These distribution functions serve as the input for the algorithms. Leveling is achieved by either mixed integer programming techniques involving the solution of a min-max optimization problem and a quadratic optimization problem, or a simulated annealing heuristic that minimizes the total probability of bed shortage or, alternatively, the total expected bed shortage