Abstract :
Surgical services require the coordination of many activities, including patient check-in and surgical preparation, surgery, and recovery after surgery. Each of these activities requires the availability of resources including staff, operating rooms, and intake and recovery beds. Furthermore, each of these activities has substantial uncertainty in their duration. The combination of a complex resource constrained environment, and uncertainty in the duration of activities, creates challenging scheduling problems. In this study we report on a discrete event simulation model of an outpatient surgical suite, and investigate the impact of several sequencing and scheduling heuristics on competing performance criteria.
Keywords :
discrete event simulation; medical administrative data processing; surgery; activity duration uncertainty; bicriteria evaluation; discrete event simulation; operating room availability; outpatient procedure center; outpatient surgery; patient check-in; patient recovery; recovery bed availability; resource availability; resource constrained environment; scheduling heuristics; staff availability; surgical preparation; surgical services; Ambulatory surgery; Discrete event simulation; Endoscopes; Job shop scheduling; Medical services; Modeling; Scheduling algorithm; Surgical instruments; Time measurement; Uncertainty;
