Stochastic programming analysis and solutions to schedule overcrowded operating rooms in China
研究中国大城市医院手术室排程问题，提出三阶段补偿模型，通过计划性取消手术来应对高需求并减少加班负面影响，发现取消成本接近加班成本时效果显著，但人力资源不可用性仍导致较大损失。
As a result of the growing demand for health services, China's large city hospitals have become markedly overstretched, resulting in delicate and complex operating room scheduling problems. While the operating rooms are struggling to meet demand, they face idle times because of (human) resources being pulled away for other urgent demands, and cancellations for economic and health reasons. In this research we analyze the resulting stochastic operating room scheduling problems, and the improvements attainable by scheduled cancellations to accommodate the large demand while avoiding the negative consequences of excessive overtime work. We present a three-stage recourse model which formalizes the scheduled cancellations and is anticipative to further uncertainty. We develop a solution method for this three-stage model which relies on the sample average approximation and the L-shaped method. The method exploits the structure of optimal solutions to speed up the optimization. Scheduled cancellations can significantly and substantially improve the operating room schedule when the costs of cancellations are close to the costs of overtime work. Moreover, the proposed methods illustrate how the adverse impact of cancellations (by patients) for economic and health reasons can be largely controlled. The (human) resource unavailability however is shown to cause a more than proportional loss of solution value for the surgery scheduling problems occurring in China's large city hospitals, even when applying the proposed solution techniques, and requires different management measures.