Optimizing a multiple objective surgical case sequencing problem

This paper studies a multi-objective combinatorial optimization problem in which the sequence of patients within the operating rooms of a freestanding ambulatory surgical center has to be determined. We show that the optimization problem is NP-hard and we develop some mixed integer linear programming solution approaches, which are either exact or heuristic in nature, to facilitate the decision process of the operating room scheduler. We gathered data from the UZ Leuven Campus Gasthuisberg (Belgium) to develop a structured but artificial test set and introduced the 224 instances to evaluate and compare the computational performance of the algorithmic approaches. Since the focus of this paper is directed towards the development and the Computational testing of the solution procedures, we only briefly document on some case study results with real data. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.