Building master surgery schedules with leveled bed occupancy and nurse workloads

The master surgery scheduling problem involves the development of a master surgical schedule, a cyclic timetable that determines the patient category associated with each block of operating room time. A myriad of variants of the problem has been addressed in literature. Here we focus on two major variants, arising during cooperation with Karmoze hospital, a non-profit hospital located in Alexandria, Egypt. The first variant asks for balancing both beds and nurses daily requirements, whereas the second for considering surgeons preferences. To cope with these problems we introduce a new mixed integer formulation. The objective function minimizes the weighted sum of peaks in the daily bed occupancy and nurse daily workloads. The results show that our model provides a more leveled daily bed occupancy and nurse requirements. Furthermore, our model reduces both the daily bed occupancy and nurse workloads.