Surgery scheduling in the presence of operating room eligibility and dedicated surgeon: an adaptive composite dispatching method
针对中国大型医院的实际问题，研究考虑手术室适用性和专属外科医生的每日手术排程，提出一种自适应复合调度方法，能显著缩短完工时间并减少夜间工作。
Motivated by a real problem in a big hospital in China, we study a daily surgery scheduling problem with operating room eligibility and dedicated surgeon. We model the problem as a parallel machine scheduling problem with machine and resource constraints to minimise the makespan, and innovatively propose an adaptive composite dispatching method to deal with such a strongly NP-hard problem. The dispatching rule is a combination of three popular rules LPT, LFJ and LRW, each of which can deal with some special features of the scheduling problems, and the scaling parameters are estimated through a statistical model learned from historical data. The adaptive composite dispatching method is easy-to-implement, fast, adaptable, robust and flexible. To examine the performance of the proposed solution approach, we first carry out a series of computational experiments showing that the adaptive composite dispatching method works very well compared to the optimal solution. Using a real data set, we further conduct a case study showing that our solution approach can improve the current practice by significantly shortening the makespan and reducing the overnight work.