A constrained NSGA-II to consider surgeons' preferences while scheduling the operating

In a more and more restricting economic context, the operating theatre planning has become a critical activity in health care management. By virtue of its huge consumption of human and material resources, the operating theatre is one of the most important sources of expenses of the hospitals. It is also an important activity in the chain of care creation and plays an important role since it directly impacts the quality of care. A less costly organization of the operating rooms goes through a more rational use of the resources and an optimized programme of the surgeries. Being concerned about the nursing staff well-being, we model the surgeon's preferences while building such schedules. This planning process is typically decomposed in two sequential phases: a planning stage followed by a scheduling stage. Due to this decomposition the resulting solutions may turn out to be sub-optimal. In this paper, we propose an approach that completely covers the planning and scheduling of the surgical operations and optimizes it by means of a popular multi-objective genetic algorithm scheme: NSGA-II. Both the antagonistic objectives we consider are costs minimization and surgeons' welfare maximization