Risk-Aware Scheduling of Elective Surgeries

This paper addresses Operating Room scheduling problems in elective surgery. In particular, we study a model for determining the surgical schedule when uncertainty on surgery duration is taken into account in order to consider and evaluate the risk of overtime and the possible waste of operating time. Surgical cases are selected from the waiting lists according to several parameters, including surgery duration, waiting time and priority class of the operations. We apply the proposed approach to the operating theatre of a public, medium-size hospital in Italy, using Mathematical Programming formulations and Monte Carlo simulations, assuring the scalability of the approach on larger hospitals.