Scheduling Operating Theatre under Human Resources Constraints

In the approach of considering human resources' preferences in the scheduling of activities, we present in this paper a contribution on the optimization of operating theatre scheduling. The operating theatre is considered as the most resources consuming unit of the hospital; its management is therefore of primary interest since an efficient planning can reduce human and financial working costs. In the pursued optic, we stress here the human resources' availabilities by, among others, allowing renewable resources like nurses or anaesthetists to leave an operation in progress. We propose in this paper a mixed integer programming and a genetic algorithm to solve the operating theatre problem, both these approaches combining surgeries planning and scheduling. The genetic procedure, which solves the problem heuristically, is the consequence of the large running times that may characterize the exact solving method