Operating Room Planning with Random Surgery Times

This paper addresses the elective surgery planning under uncertainties related to surgery times and emergency surgery demands. Surgery times as well operating rooms´ capacities used by emergency surgery are assumed to be random variables. The planning problem consists of assigning elective patients to operating rooms (ORs) over a planning horizon in order to minimize patients´ related costs and expected ORs´ overtime costs. The planning problem is first formulated as a stochastic mathematical program. Then, a solution approach combining Monte Carlo simulation and column generation has been proposed. Computation experiments show that the solution approach results in near-optimal solutions in a reasonable computation time.