Operating Room Planning and Scheduling

Operating room (OR) planning and scheduling decisions involve the coordination of patients, medical staff, and hospital facilities. The patients arriving to the hospital are assigned to a surgery date and a surgery time slot. At the time of surgery, a suitable OR, the attending surgeon, supporting anesthesiologists, nurses, and, after the surgery, rooms in secondary facilities such as post-anesthesia care unit (PACU), intensive care unit (ICU), and ward need to be available. In order to deal with the complexity and the variety of problems faced in OR scheduling, it is useful to involve methods from operations research. In this chapter, we review the recent literature on the application of operations research to OR planning and scheduling. We start by discussing the impact of planning and scheduling of the ORs on the overall performance of a hospital. Next, we discuss the criteria for included publications and summarize the structure of Cardoen et al. (Eur J Oper Res 201:921–932, 2010) that served as the guideline for organization of this chapter. In the remainder of the chapter, we describe the evolution of the literature over the last 10 years with regard to the patient type, the different performance measures, the decision that has to be made, the incorporation of uncertainty, the operations research methodology, and the applicability of the research. Moreover, each of these evolutions will be demonstrated with a short review of some relevant papers. This chapter ends with conclusions and a discussion of interesting topics for further research.