Heuristic approch for solving the makespan problem in a hospital sterilization service

In this work, we focus on the study of a scheduling problem that arises in the sterilization services in hospitals. The main role of a sterilization service is the disinfection of the reusable medical devices used in surgical operation rooms. Sterilization process has a well-defined cycle and it consists of the following steps: washing, cleaning, checking, packaging, and sterilization. Some of these steps are processed manually and others are processed on special machines. We propose a variable neighborhood descent based heuristic to minimize the makespan of the tasks processed manually on the sterilization services in the hospital “Jolimont”. Benchmarks based on data from hospitals are generated and computational experiments are done.