Operating room scheduling in the Erasmus Medical Center

In this research we constructed different operating room schedules that fit the needs of the Erasmus Medical Center. The schedules differ in scheduling strategy, working hours, overtime and unused capacity. The operating rooms of the Erasmus Medical Center will be moved and centralized in a new building, which results in a whole new set of restrictions that should be incorporated. Surgical procedures are grouped per specialism and operation codes, from which the durations are estimated. The open scheduling strategy and block scheduling strategy are used to construct schedules. A first-fit heuristic is used to schedule the procedures for both strategies, whereafter a simulated annealing heuristic improves those schedules. The overtime and unused capacity are the lowest under the open scheduling strategy. For both strategies we found schedules that perform better in terms of overtime and unused capacity compared to the current situation. An iterative process is needed to come up with a block schedule that fits all the needs of the Erasmus Medical Center, which should be continued. The constructed model can be used to check the performance of proposed block schedules, which may be useful in the coming years before the migration to the new building.