title: Surgery scheduling optimization considering real life constraints and comprehensive operation cost of operating room.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Operating Room (OR) is the core sector in hospital expenditure, the operation management of which involves a complete three-stage surgery flow, multiple resources, prioritization of the various surgeries, and several real-life OR constraints. As such reasonable surgery scheduling is crucial to OR management.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  To optimize OR management and reduce operation cost, a short-term surgery scheduling problem is proposed and defined based on the survey of the OR operation in a typical hospital in China.
  
  
  METHODS
  The comprehensive operation cost is clearly defined considering both under-utilization and overutilization. A nested Ant Colony Optimization (nested-ACO) incorporated with several real-life OR constraints is proposed to solve such a combinatorial optimization problem.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The 10-day manual surgery schedules from a hospital in China are compared with the optimized schedules solved by the nested-ACO. Comparison results show the advantage using the nested-ACO in several measurements: OR-related time, nurse-related time, variation in resources' working time, and the end time.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The nested-ACO considering real-life operation constraints such as the difference between first and following case, surgeries priority, and fixed nurses in pre/post-operative stage is proposed to solve the surgery scheduling optimization problem. The results clearly show the benefit of using the nested-ACO in enhancing the OR management efficiency and minimizing the comprehensive overall operation cost.
authors.forename: Wei
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Xiang
authors.forename: Chong
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Li
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001071:Appointments and Schedules; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D017046:Cost Savings; D017598:Efficiency, Organizational; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D009873:Operating Rooms / Q000458:organization & administration*; D061646:Operative Time; D010561:Personnel Staffing and Scheduling / Q000458:organization & administration; D013997:Time Factors; D057188:Workflow
keywords: Surgery scheduling; ant colony optimization; operating room management; operation cost