Harmony Search Algorithm for Stochastic Operating Room Scheduling Considering Overhead Costs and Number of Surgeries

Given the increasing human need for health systems and the costs of using such systems, the problem of optimizing health-related systems has attracted the attention of many researchers. One of the most critical cases in this area is the operating room scheduling. Much of the cost of health systems is related to operating room costs. Therefore, planning and scheduling of operating rooms can play an essential role in increasing the efficiency of health systems as well as reducing costs. Given the uncertain factors involved in such matters, attention to uncertainty in this problem is one of the most critical factors in the results. In this study, the problem of the daily scheduling of the operating room with uncertain surgical time was investigated. For minimizing overhead costs and maximizing the number of surgeries to reduce patients' waiting time, after introducing a mathematical model, a chance-constrained programming approach is used to deal with its uncertainty. In this study, also, a harmony search algorithm is proposed to solve the model because of its NP-Hardness. By performing the numerical analysis and comparing the presented algorithm result with a genetic algorithm, the results show that the proposed algorithm has a better performance.