Cyclic Surgical Schedules: Theory and Practice

Operating room (OR) schedules are often not optimal regarding use of scarce OR time and cause demand fluctuations in other departments such as surgical wards and intensive care units. To deal with this problem we propose using cyclic operating room schedules, so-called Master Surgical Schedules (MSSs). Constructing and using such a schedule yields several managerial and mathematical problems that will be discussed in the presentation. For the construction of the actual cyclic schedule, we propose a two-phase column generation approach that first maximizes OR utilization and subsequently levels the demand for succeeding hospital departments such as wards and intensive care units. We test the solution approach with data from Erasmus University Medical Center.