A hierarchical multiple criteria mathematical programming approach for scheduling general surgery operations in large hospitals.

Limited staff and equipment within surgical services require efficient use of these resources among multiple surgeon groups. In this study, a set of hierarchical multiple criteria mathematical programming models are developed to generate weekly operating room schedules. The goals considered in these models are maximum utilization of operating room capacity, balanced distribution of operations among surgeon groups in terms of operation days, lengths of operation times, and minimization of patient waiting times. Because of computational difficulty of this scheduling problem, the overall problem is broken down into manageable hierarchical stages: (1) selection of patients, (2) assignment of operations to surgeon groups, and (3) determination of operation dates and operating rooms. Developed models are tested on the data collected in College of Medicine Research Hospital at Cukurova University as well as on simulated data sets using MPL optimization package.