Evaluation of Robust Operating Room Schedules Considering Multiple Stakeholders

Operating room (OR) schedules are regularly influenced by uncertain demands such as surgery durations or randomly arriving emergency patients. The performance of these schedules depend on the information about these uncertainties when designing the schedules. We focus on an offline operational planning level at which assignments of patients to days and rooms are made without focusing on the intra-day sequence. At this level a sufficient amount of time is to be reserved for every elective surgery. At the same time we observe that the performance of a given schedule influences several stakeholders’ interests. We therefore combine the aspects uncertain planning parameters and multiple interests and investigate the performance of schedules for ORs using a dedicated robust multi-criteria optimization approach. We compute different schedules focusing on fluctuating surgery times, randomly arriving emergency demand, and different objectives. In order to evaluate the schedules’ quality, we perform a simulation study and demonstrate to what extend robust schedules achieve the mentioned goals. The consequences of significant changes in assumptions about possible deviations in surgery times and how they affect the level of achievement of different objectives is investigated in a second step