A dichotomic algorithm for an operating room scheduling problem

In this paper, we study an NP-hard operating room scheduling problem, consisting in a set of operations which have to be scheduled on identical operating rooms. In this problem, the operations are divided in groups; each one should be achieved by a single surgeon. The objective is to minimize the global completion time of the operations. We start by providing a mathematical model inspired from the two-dimensional Strip Packing problems and we compare its performances to the classical formulation. Then we introduce a dichotomic algorithm that we use to solve some larger instances of the problem.