• Wei Xiang and Chong Li.
• Technol Health Care. 2015 Jan 1; 23 (5): 605-17.

BackgroundOperating Room (OR) is the core sector in hospital expenditure, the operation management of which involves a complete three-stage surgery flow, multiple resources, prioritization of the various surgeries, and several real-life OR constraints. As such reasonable surgery scheduling is crucial to OR management.ObjectiveTo optimize OR management and reduce operation cost, a short-term surgery scheduling problem is proposed and defined based on the survey of the OR operation in a typical hospital in China.MethodThe comprehensive operation cost is clearly defined considering both under-utilization and overutilization. A nested Ant Colony Optimization (nested-ACO) incorporated with several real-life OR constraints is proposed to solve such a combinatorial optimization problem.ResultsThe 10-day manual surgery schedules from a hospital in China are compared with the optimized schedules solved by the nested-ACO. Comparison results show the advantage using the nested-ACO in several measurements: OR-related time, nurse-related time, variation in resources' working time, and the end time.ConclusionsThe nested-ACO considering real-life operation constraints such as the difference between first and following case, surgeries priority, and fixed nurses in pre/post-operative stage is proposed to solve the surgery scheduling optimization problem. The results clearly show the benefit of using the nested-ACO in enhancing the OR management efficiency and minimizing the comprehensive overall operation cost.

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