Operating room scheduling: an empirical study

In this paper we present three MIP models to address the Master Surgical Scheduling (MSS) problem. With these models we investigate the impact of different balancing policies on the possibility of finding solutions characterized by a satisfactory trade-off between efficiency and robustness. Specifically, the object of the balancing is the daily utilization of the ORs and/or the post-surgical beds. The models are characterized by different objective functions, each implementing a different balancing policy. All the presented models are based on a model we developed in a previous work. The models robustness has been assessed using discrete event simulation.