An operating theatre planning and scheduling problem in the case of a "block scheduling" strategy

Nowadays, the complexity of the organization in the hospitals must take account of the increasing cost of cares that has followed the progress in medicine. Material and human resources are more efficient but rare and not multipliable due to their costs, while in parallel the demand is increasing. In order to optimize the ratio `quality of cares/cost of cares´, it may be interesting to adapt to the medical cares some optimization studies which are led in the industry. We proposed an interactive assistance system (IAS) -meant for new agile production systems involving humans - to help the operators to choose the most productive task at time of decision. Although healthcare systems organization is completely different from industrial organizations, we think that such IAS could be helpful for certain medical units. The paper first presents the IAS: its principle, its generic character and its Web client server organization. Then, it illustrates the IAS functioning by considering an endoscopy unit: it explains the steps of customization for this unit