Promise surgery start times and implementation strategies

This paper addresses the problem of scheduling a set of surgeries planned for a given day with random surgery durations. We propose an original concept of promised surgery start times determined at the beginning of the day in order to release the surgeons from endless waiting. Stochastic programming models are proposed for optimization of promised surgery start times. In order to further reduce the waste time of operating rooms and surgeons, two-stage stochastic programming models are then proposed to design strategies for rescheduling remaining surgeries and for advancing surgeon arrivals during the course of the day. Simulation results show that the real-time surgery rescheduling is able to reduce the overall costs and surgeon advance arrivals further improves the system.