Multi-Mode Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problem: A Survey of Variants, Extensions, and Methods

Surgical theater is one of the most expensive hospital resources which accounts for a high percentage of hospital receptions. Therefore, efficient planning and scheduling of the operating rooms (ORs) is necessary to improving the efficiency of any healthcare system. In this paper, weekly o‎r planning and scheduling problem was addressed to minimize waiting time of elective patients, overutilization and underutilization costs of ORs, and the total completion time of surgeries. In our model, the available hours of ORs, recovery beds, the surgeons, legal constraints and job qualification of surgeons, and priority of patients were taken into account. A real-life example was provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of the model and was solved using ε- constraint method in GAMS software. Then, data envelopment analysis (DEA) was employed to obtain the best solution among the Pareto solutions obtained by ε-constraint method. Finally, the best Pareto solution was compared with the schedule used in the hospitals. The results indicated that the best Pareto solution outperforms the schedule offered by the o‎r director.