Robust surgery loading

We consider the robust surgery loading problem for a hospital's operating theatre department, which concerns assigning surgeries and sufficient planned slack to operating room days. The objective is to maximize capacity utilization and minimize the risk of overtime, and thus cancelled patients. This research was performed in collaboration with the Erasmus MC, a large academic hospital in the Netherlands, which has also provided historical data for the experiments. We propose various constructive heuristics and local search methods that use statistical information on surgery durations to exploit the portfolio effect, and thereby to minimize the required slack. We demonstrate that our approach frees a lot of operating room capacity, which may be used to perform additional surgeries. Furthermore, we show that by combining advanced optimization techniques with extensive historical statistical records on surgery durations can significantly improve the operating room department utilization. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.