A Column-Generation Based Approach for Integrating Surgeon and Surgery Scheduling

This paper addresses the operating room management problem for private hospitals aimed at the high-end customer market. A patient preference-driven policy that incorporates surgeon scheduling into the surgery scheduling process is proposed to satisfy patients' personalised preferences for surgeons and surgery dates. A stochastic programming model is formulated with the objective of minimizing operating rooms' staffing costs. A column generation-based heuristic algorithm is developed to solve the integrated surgeon and surgery scheduling issue. The performance of the algorithm is tested on different scale instances. Numerical results indicate that the patient-preference driven approach can identify an effective solution to operating room scheduling that satisfies patients' preferences with only slightly increased staffing costs. Additionally, the column generation-based heuristic algorithm can obtain solutions within a 1.6% gap of the lower bound obtained by the linear relaxed problem.