Operating room scheduling by considering the decision-making styles of surgical team members: A comprehensive approach

This paper presents a comprehensive and novel mathematical model to address the scheduling problem of inpatient surgeries. The interaction quality and compatibility level of surgical team members can have a significant impact on the quality and safety of a surgery. The first aim of this paper is to incorporate the decision-making styles of the surgical team members (as a personality indicator) in an operating room scheduling problem to improve the compatibility level within the surgical teams. The second aim of this paper is to provide a more effective and realistic solution for the problem by considering several practical factors. These factors include the availability of material resources (i.e., operating rooms, post-anesthesia beds, and equipment), priorities of patients, and availability, skills, and competencies of the surgical personnel. To cope with the computational complexity of the problem, two metaheuristics (i.e., NSGA-II and MOPSO) are developed to find Pareto solutions. Furthermore, the PROMETHEE-II method is used to select the best among the obtained Pareto solutions. Finally, a real case study is provided to show the applicability of the developed approach.