Operating room scheduling including medical devices sterilization: towards a transverse logistic

Abstract

There is a large number of papers which studies the hospital operating theater management and more precisely the operating room planning and scheduling. The purpose of these researches is to find methods to organize the prescribe surgical procedures and determine a planning which improves a chosen performance criterion while considering the hospital context constraints. In this paper, we focus on the importance of the medical devices sterilization step in operating theater scheduling and propose a method to reduce the number of medical devices boxes needed to respect a planning. From this standpoint, we develop several met a-heuristics (genetic algorithm, particle swarm optimization and tabu search) to solve the problem. With this work, we hope to lay the foundation for a transverse logistic between the hospital pharmacy and the operating theater. Such a logistic may be applied in a multi-site context with a central pharmacy providing surgical devices to several hospital complexes.