Dynamic configuration scheduling problem for stochastic medical resources

Abstract

Scheduling approaches for conventional surgery operating rooms in a hospital treat surgeons as bottleneck resources directly, but do not deal with stochastic medical resources, leading to an uneven human resource distribution in optimizing medical resource scheduling. Thus, this research focuses on the dynamic configuration scheduling problem for stochastic medical resources. In this paper, the surgical operating room is limited, and the arriving calls (i.e., number of patients) are dynamic. When a patient arrives, the nurse anesthetist and anesthesiologist are limited, but the medical service duration per patient is random. We introduce the drum-buffer-rope (DBR) scheduling approach to analyze which types of medical resources become bottleneck resources for optimizing operating room scheduling. After verifying the effectiveness of the DBR method in uncertain situations, the Monte Carlo simulation is demonstrated.