Surgical Scheduling Case Problem: Advanced Ant System Approach

in this research, we address the surgical case scheduling (SCS) problem in order to minimize makespan. In surgical case scheduling, not only the hospital resources are allocated to surgical cases but also the start time of performing surgeries is determined based on sequence of cases in a shortterm time horizon. Minimization of makespan for SCS is strongly Np-hard optimization problem; hence we employ ant colony optimization algorithms such as ant system (AS), ant colony system (ACS), and elitism ant system (EAS) so as to tackle this problem. Each algorithm is built in two-level comprise of sequencing and allocating. These proposed approaches are illustrated by three test instances include of small, medium, and large dataset. Consequently, results of experiments indicate that ant colony system and elitism ant system outperform traditional ant system.