Patients scheduling in a hospital operating theatre

This paper addresses the problem of scheduling patients in a hospital operating theatre. Three types of resources are considered: porters, operating rooms and recovery beds. The problem consists of assigning patients to the different resources in order to minimize a criterion function of their completion times. We explore the use of column generation as a decomposition approach to solve the scheduling problem. Our computational study suggests that the proposed approach find effectively high quality schedules and competes successfully with alternative decomposition approaches such as Lagrangian relaxation. This research illustrates that column generation is a promising decomposition approach for the scheduling problem.