Scheduling patients in an ambulatory surgical center

This paper presents a deterministic approach to schedule patients in an ambulatory surgical center (ASC) such that the number of postanesthesia care unit nurses at the center is minimized. We formulate the patient scheduling problem as new variants of the no-wait, two-stage process shop scheduling problem and present computational complexity results for the new scheduling models. Also, we develop a tabu search-based heuristic algorithm to solve the patient scheduling problem. Our algorithm is shown to be very effective in finding near optimal schedules on a set of real data from a university hospital's ASC. (C) 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.