An Operating theatre planning and scheduling problem in the case of an 'Open Scheduling' strategy

Among all sectors of a hospital, the operating theatre always draws the most attention of hospital managers because it is one of the most important and expensive sectors. Due to the constraint of budgets, resource-allocation issue has been recognized as a common problem in health-care organizations, and actually it is significant to operating theatre as well. In this paper, we focus on an operating theatre planning and scheduling problem in the case of an "open scheduling" strategy. In other words, we aim at assigning a set of surgical cases to an operating theatre, where both operating rooms and recovery beds of the recovery room are multifunctional, during one week by minimizing the operating cost and maximizing the utilization of operating theatre.