Investigating the relationship between resources balancing and robustness in master surgical scheduling

In this paper: (i) we present a MIP model to address the Master Surgical Scheduling problem; (ii) we discuss the impact of different resources balancing strategies upon the schedule’s efficiency and robustness. Each balancing strategy is associated with a different objective function. The resources whose utilization is balanced are the Operating Rooms and the post-surgical beds. The MIP model is solved considering deterministic values for the surgical times and length of stays. The schedule robustness against the variability of both these times is assessed via discrete event simulation.