Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present the research for improvement of the operating room in a hospital, to reduce patient waiting time and increase the resource utilization. Design/methodology/approach – Value stream mapping (VSM) is used to represent the entire operating room...

Purpose – This paper aims to introduce the efficiency improvement in the operating room (OR) of a local hospital using the integration of simulation and optimization. Design/methodology/approach – Based on the simulation model, a Tabu search (TS) algorithm is developed as an optimizer for...