Scheduling an operating theatre under human resource constraints

In the present economic context, the operating theatre is considered as a critical activity in health care management. By virtue of its huge consumption of human and material resources, the operating theatre is one of the most important sources of expenses of the hospitals. A less costly organization of the operating rooms calls for a more rational use of the resources and a more refined planning of the surgical units. In addition to these considerations, we are concerned about the well-being of the medical staff. We integrate this human factor into the optimization procedure by stressing the human resources' availabilities in the design of the schedules. This planning process is typically decomposed in two sequential phases: a planning stage followed by a scheduling stage. Due to this decomposition the resulting solutions may turn out to be sub-optimal. In this paper, we propose a formulation that includes both the planning and scheduling of the surgical operations. We also propose a heuristic solution procedure based on genetic algorithms to counter the large running times inherent in tackling this kind of hard optimization problem.