Multi-surgeon and priority-aware scheduling for operating rooms scheduling: a robust-based approach

In the realm of medical centre operations, Operating Room (OR) departments emerge as pivotal entities, given their substantial financial and social implications. A fundamental aspect of OR theatre management pertains to advance scheduling. Within this research, a novel robust-based modelling approach is developed to formulate the Operating Room Scheduling (ORS) under an open scheduling strategy, considering both the most optimistic and pessimistic scenarios for surgeries. This approach ensures that the total duration of surgeries in an OR adheres to both standard and the maximum allowable working hours, even when surgeries extend to their best-case and worst-case durations on a given day. Furthermore, the model accommodates surgeries involving multiple surgeons from diverse specialties. To minimise the cancellation rate of critical patient operations, the prioritisation of vital patients in the sequence of daily operations is incorporated. The study employs an efficient solution approach combining the use of Lagrangian Relaxation to derive relaxations, and Valid Inequalities (VIs) to strengthen the quality of relaxation. This approach aims to enhance computational efficiency and reduce processing time for the proposed model. To validate its practicality and effectiveness, the model is applied to a real-world case study. The research also encompasses sensitivity analyses, offering valuable managerial insights.