Application of Operations Research methods in operating room scheduling - a short survey

The surgical services provided in the operating rooms of the hospital are an essential part of the healthcare system. These services are usually life-threatening and time-sensitive, and require highly trained surgeons and staff, as well as the latest medical equipment. Furthermore, because of the high cost of these resources, hospitals can have only a limited number of operating rooms and staff members. Thus, it is crucial to optimize various aspects of operating room functions to maximize overall utilization. This survey summarizes various optimization models proposed in the literature for such problems faced in operating rooms. The goal of this work is to provide researchers with a guide for further research in the field. Methods: This survey includes articles from Pubmed, since 2010. The search queries were related to the terms scheduling operating room, optimization model, and queuing. More than 400 articles were found, and the authors filtered the articles based on their relevance to this survey. The analysis found that a) the studies are usually very specific to optimizing a particular problem related to the operating room, b) datasets are not available in the literature and it is difficult to conduct comparative analysis, similarly c) the source code is not available on publicly available repositories like GitHub, and d) it is difficult to replicate the studies and establish benchmarks.