Simulation-based surgery appointment sequencing and scheduling of multiple operating rooms

This paper addresses the problem of surgery appointment sequencing and scheduling of multiple operating rooms for a given day with random surgery durations. It differs from past literature in the sense that operating rooms are dynamically assigned to surgeons in a sequence of appointments. We formulate this problem as a mixed integer optimization via simulation model. However, the problem is presumably NP-hard. To tackle the computational complexity, we propose several sequencing heuristics and a revised COMPASS algorithm combined with a stochastic gradient algorithm to solve the problem. Simulation results show that smallest variance first heuristic is no longer an excellent appointment sequencing rule in the multiple operating rooms setting and the revised COMPASS is able to significantly outperform benchmark heuristics.