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Full Text, Thesis (PhD Doctorate), Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Institute for Integrated and Intelligent Systems, Science, Environment, Engineering and Technology, Scheduling problems emerge almost everywhere in real world situations. Efficient scheduling of resources in dynamic complex real world environments continues to pose a significant research challenge. Every real world problem has its own idiosyn- crasies, and environments in the real world are often more complicated. In real world dynamic environments, inevitable and unpredictable real-time events often force a change in scheduled plans. Despite this, most current approaches have been focused on solving simplified scheduling models assuming that all problem characteristics are known in advance. As the hospital’s largest revenue and cost centre, operating rooms are of pivotal importance to hospitals. Any improvement of surgery delivery systems is particularly important for hospitals. With healthcare starting to buckle under the pressures of growing demand and encumbered resources, improving operating room scheduling to deliver a significant improvement in utilisation of this overburdened resource is more important than ever. Motivated with this need, this dissertation describes our efforts to deliver significant improvements to operating room scheduling processes, particularly in Australian public hospitals.