Page 108 - The-5th-MCAIT2021-eProceeding

Scheduling Strategies for Operating Room Surgical
Scheduling Problems

a
b
Masri Ayob , Dewan Mahmuda Zaman *
a,b Data Mining & Optimization Research Group (DMO), Center for Artificial Intelligence (CAIT), Faculty of Information Science &
Technology, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), Malaysia
*Email:mahmudazaman0509@gmail.com

Abstract

Optimizing surgical scheduling problem (SSP) plays a crucial role in improving hospital health care services. Many studies
tackled this problem with different perspectives, i.e. different solution approaches, decision levels, mathematical models
and scheduling strategies. Thus, this work aims to review some literature in SSP that focused on scheduling strategies: open
strategy, block strategy and modified block strategy. We discuss the strength and limitation of these scheduling strategies
and pointed out the practicality of these strategies in real hospital practice. We also identified some approaches proposed in
the literature related to each of these strategies. The study shows that block strategy is widely used in real life though it has
some limitations, such as underutilization which can be tackled by applying modified block strategy. We also addressed that
among several solution approaches, metaheuristics are frequently applied while considering different scheduling strategies.

Keywords: Surgical scheduling; Operating room; Scheduling strategy;

1. Introduction

In recent years, the operating room plays a crucial role in health care, and the demand for quality service is
increasing day by day. The operating room is the core sector for both cost and revenue in a hospital (May et al,
2011). It is reported that more than 60% of patients are admitted for surgical operation, and undoubtedly, it is a
very complex task to be tackled by the hospital management (Fügener et al,2017). The surgical scheduling
problem (SSP) is a complex problem because it involves many resources and stages. Many works tackled this
problem from different perspectives, such as solution approaches, decision levels, mathematical models and
scheduling strategies. The targets of hospital managers are to maximize the utilization of operating room and
this leads to different strategic plans (Gür & Eren, 2018). Thus, in this work, we focus on the view of scheduling
strategies. Scheduling strategies can be grouped into three strategies: open strategy, block strategy and modified
block strategy.
Block Scheduling Strategy: A scheduling strategy is called block strategy when each operating room is pre-
allocated to a speciality with different surgery groups such as surgeons (Zhu et al, 2019). Each operating room
can be divided into different time slots for different speciality, or can be allocated with a speciality for the whole
day (Zhu et al, 2019). In block scheduling, some human resources such as nurses and anesthesiologist are
assigned to each block, which is applicable for a cyclic timetable such as a certain number of weeks or months
(Rahimi & Gandomi, 2020). This strategy can be classified into two types such as block strategy with master
surgical scheduling and block strategy without master surgical scheduling (Gür & Eren, 2018).
Open Scheduling Strategy: This strategy is the opposite of the block scheduling strategy. There is no pre-
allocation of any operating room. Surgery case can be assigned to any operating room regardless of the type
(Agnetis et al, 2014). If the number of required resources is available, the surgery can be performed in any
suitable operating room. Most of the time, open strategy follows First-Come-First-Serve principle (Zhu et al,
2019). Patients are scheduled without any speciality related restriction (Augusto et al, 2010). While assigning

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Artificial Intelligence in the 4th Industrial Revolution