Heuristics for the Operating Theatre Planning and Scheduling

In this paper, we present a two-stage approach for planning and scheduling of operating theatres. The first stage concerns the operating theatre planning problem with the objectiveof minimizing number of days required to assign all surgical cases and number of days wasted for failure to meet surgical cases deadlines. The second stage refers to the operating theatre scheduling problem with the objective of minimizing total tardiness of surgical cases and total waiting time of surgeons in operating rooms. For each problem investigated, a mathematical formulation using a mixed integer programming has been suggested. And to solve the foregoing problems, we propose firstly a set of dispatching rulebased heuristics and secondly three metaheuristics. Finally, computational experiments are presented to compare the performances of these heuristics.