An integrated operating room and physician scheduling problem solved by a hybrid variable neighborhood search-based algorithm

This paper addresses an integrated operating room (OR) and physician scheduling problem driven by the real-world needs in the surgical department. The OR scheduling problem involves determining the number of ORs to be opened each day, the operation date of each surgery, and the schedule of surgeries in each OR. The physician scheduling problem considers two primary work for physicians: surgery service and consultation service, aiming to assign physicians to shifts and determine their responsibilities for either performing surgeries or providing consultation services in the outpatient department. The integration of these two scheduling problems improves coordination between OR availability and physician schedules, which can directly reduce operational costs and enhance resource utilization in the surgical department. The objective of the integrated problem is to minimize the total costs of the hospital and the patients, including the total waiting cost of patients, the total working cost of physicians, the total opening cost of ORs, and the total overtime cost of ORs. To solve the problem, a hybrid approach DP-H-VNS is proposed, which incorporates dynamic programming (DP), heuristics, and a variable neighborhood search (VNS) algorithm. The DP algorithm is used to assign surgeries to specific ORs, while the proposed heuristic rules are presented to determine the number of ORs to open each day and the scheduling of physicians. The presented VNS algorithm can search for high-quality solutions for the proposed problem and serves as a framework to integrate the DP, heuristics, local search, and shaking procedures. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DP-H-VNS is superior to the other compared algorithms on the quality of the found solutions and the performance. These results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach in optimizing the resource allocation in the surgical department and improving patient care.