Offline Patient Admission, Room and Surgery Scheduling Problems

Abstract

Patient admission and surgery scheduling is a complex combinatorial optimization problem. It consists on defining patient admission dates, assigning them to suitable rooms, and schedule surgeries accordingly to an existing master surgical schedule. This problem belongs to the class of NP-hard problems. In this paper, we firstly formulate an integer programming model for offline patient admissions, room assignments, and surgery scheduling; then apply a matheuristic that combines exact methods with rescheduling approaches. The matheuristic is evaluated using benchmark datasets. The experimental results improve those reported in the literature and show that the proposed method outperforms existing techniques of the state-of-the-arts.