An Optimization Model and Decision Support System of Operating Room Scheduling in a Teaching Hospital

Abstract

Department of Surgery (DOS) contributes to a major portion of hospital’s expenditures and revenues. The costs come from resources which are involved in a surgery. These resources must be used optimally through proper scheduling. Recently, there are still many hospitals scheduling the operating rooms manually which will take relatively longer time. Whereas the scheduling of the operating room can be done through developing a mathematical model. We consider several aspects in the model of this research, including the number of operating rooms, working hours, the available number of anesthetic machines, and utilization of each room. We propose a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model to solve the operating room scheduling problem and based on the model, a decision support system (DSS) is developed to allow the hospital generates a better schedule with a shorter time. The results of sensitivity shows that the model is sensitive to the changes of surgery duration and the available number of anesthetic machines.

Keywords

• decision support system
• mixed integer linear programming
• operating rooms
• scheduling