Stochastic Programming Approach to Scheduling Elective Surgeries and the Effects of Newsvendor Ratio on Operating Room Utilization

The purpose of this paper is to schedule elective surgery patients using a stochastic programming approach and to illustrate how operating room utilization behaves when a decision-maker varies costs associated with utilization. Because of the uncertainty in surgery durations, the underage and overage costs that a decision-maker considers plays an important role in allocating surgery cases into available operating room capacity. We formulate the problem as a stochastic mixed integer programming and propose a sampling-based approximation method for a computational purpose. Newsvendor model is employed to explain the results from numerical experiments that are conducted with the actual data from a hospital. The results show that the operating room utilization is more sensitive when the unit overtime cost is relatively larger than the unit cost for underutilized time.