Reservation Planning for Elective Surgery Under Uncertain Demand for Emergency Surgery
研究医院在急诊手术占用手术室容量不确定的情况下，如何提前安排择期手术。每天有新的择期手术预约请求，医院需决定当天接收多少，以避免超负荷而拒收急诊。通过随机动态规划模型分析最优策略，并用数值例子验证。
This work concerns the advance scheduling of elective surgery when the operating rooms' capacity utilization by emergency surgery, as well as by elective procedures, is uncertain. New requests for bookings of elective surgery arrive each day. Such procedures preferably would be performed as soon as possible, but admitting too many patients may result in exceeding a day's capacity, possibly necessitating turning away some emergency cases. So the problem facing the hospital at the start of each day is how many of the additional requests for elective surgery to assign for that day. We provide a stochastic dynamic programming model for this aggregate advance scheduling problem. The model has some novel mathematical features. We analyze it and characterize the nature of the optimal policy, which is not necessarily of a control-limit type. Plausible numerical examples which confirm our theoretical results and provide additional insights are reported.