Maximizing the utilization of operating rooms with stochastic times using simulation

This paper addresses a surgery rooms scheduling problem. The problem is modeled as a parallel machine scheduling problem with sequence dependent setup times and an objective of minimizing the makespan. This is a NP-hard problem and in this paper, a solution heuristic is developed and compared to existing ones using simulation. The results and analysis obtained from the computational experiments proved the superiority of the proposed algorithm LEPST over the other algorithms presented.