Operating room scheduling by emphasising human factors and dynamic decision-making styles: a constraint programming method

Abstract

ABSTRACT As the most crucial component of a hospital, the operating room (OR) is the primary source of revenue generation and expenditures. The hospital’s overall performance will be enhanced if this ward’s scheduling is accurate. This study investigates a multi-objective mixed-integer programming model for daily OR scheduling of inpatient surgeries. A major consideration is the setup time (e.g. cleaning, sterilising, and preparing the necessary OR equipment) for the OR when commencing additional surgeries in the same OR. The surgical staff’s performance, interaction quality, and compatibility level play a significant role in the surgery’s quality, success, and safety. As individuals’ decision-making styles vary depending on the situation, one of the objectives increases the compatibility of surgical team members by considering their primary and backup decision-making styles. Another objective is to maximise the efficiency of the surgical team. To this end, this paper employs the TOPSIS method to calculate each person’s efficiency level. The final objective is to minimise OR costs (including the opening and overtime cost of OR and wait time cost for each person). To address problem’s computational complexity, this paper develops a constraint programming (CP) method, and also a novel hybrid mixed-integer linear programming-CP method to solve the real-world instances.