Fuzzy Logic for the Stochastic Operating Theater Optimization: A Review

Aiming to increase patient satisfaction, health care centers also try to reduce their expenditures and improve their financial assets. Furthermore, surgical services receive most of the demand in hospital treatment systems. Operating room scheduling is one of the many complexities encountered in hospitals. The scheduling decision for operating room includes the assignment of surgery cases to operating rooms, and the surgery sequence in each operating room. The key objectives of the hospital authorities are to optimally utilize resources and to plan the surgery at the right time and at the right operating room. Planning and scheduling of the operating rooms present an undeniable role in providing appropriate services in hospitals. Uncertainty is one of the major problems associated with the development of accurate operating room schedules or capacity planning strategies. Two types of uncertainty that seem to be well addressed in the literature are patient arrival uncertainty and surgery duration uncertainty which is the uncertainty inherent to surgical services. In this chapter, we highlight how the fuzzy logic can be a good solution to the uncertainty problems within the operating theater.