Scheduling operating rooms: achievements, challenges and pitfalls

In hospitals, the operating room (OR) is a particularly expensive facility and thus efficient scheduling is imperative. This can be greatly supported by using advanced methods that are discussed in the academic literature. In order to help researchers and practitioners to select new relevant articles, we classify the recent OR planning and scheduling literature into tables using patient type, used performance measures, decisions made, OR supporting units, uncertainty, research methodology and testing phase. Additionally, we identify promising practices and trends and recognize common pitfalls when researching OR scheduling. Our findings indicate, among others, that it is often unclear whether an article mainly targets researchers and thus contributes advanced methods or targets practitioners and consequently provides managerial insights. Moreover, many performance measures (e.g., overtime) are not always used in the correct context. Furthermore, we see that important information that would allow readers to determine whether the reported research results are relevant to them is often missing. In order to avoid these pitfalls, we conclude that researchers need to state whether they target researchers or practitioners, motivate the choice of the used performance measures and mention both setting and method specific assumptions.