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Scheduling of elective operations with coordinated utilization of hospital beds and operating rooms

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Abstract

The problem studied in this paper is elective surgery scheduling, with resource constraints in each of the three following stages: preoperative, perioperative, and postoperative stages. With the integrated availability of hospital beds in wards and operating rooms, the aim is to determine operation start times of surgeries and allocate the hospital beds to patients while getting patients treated as soon as possible. This task is crucial in providing timely treatments for the patients while ensuring the hospital’s resource utilization balance. For the problem, we first formulate it as mixed-integer programming, which is NP-complete. Then, we propose several heuristics to overcome the long computation time. To make the solution better, we also propose improved algorithms. Finally, we conduct a series of numerical studies to illustrate the efficiency of our proposed algorithms and examine the impact of the number of jobs, beds, and surgery blocks on the performance measure. Computational experiments showed the superior performance of our heuristics in makespan.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Funding

Zhaohui Li is supported in part by the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation GZC20230378 and the National Natural Science Foundation of China 72301055. Haiyue Yu is supported in part by National Health Commission Hospital Management Institute Healthcare Quality (Evidence-Based) Management Research Project YLZLXZ23H004, Shanghai Shenkang Hospital Development Center Healthcare Management Project SHDC12023628, and Traditional Chinese Medicine Science and Technology Development Project of Shanghai Medical Innovation & Development Foundation WL-HBQN-2022019K.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management and Economics, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China

    Zhaohui Li

  2. Shanghai Municipal Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Shanghai, China

    Haiyue Yu

  3. Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Metabolism and Molecular Medicine, Department of Endocrinology and Metabolism, Zhongshan Hospital, Fudan University, Shanghai, China

    Zhaowei Zhou

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  1. Zhaohui Li
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Li, Z., Yu, H. & Zhou, Z. Scheduling of elective operations with coordinated utilization of hospital beds and operating rooms. J Comb Optim 47, 75 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10878-024-01167-1

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