Optimization of dynamic operating theatre facility layout

The Operating Theater (OT) is known to be a fluctuating production system. The unpredictability of populations' needs has an impact on the required human and material resources. This makes the Operating Theater a dynamic environment. Thus, use of dynamic models is getting more realistic to solve OT layout problems. The Dynamic Operating Theater Layout Problem (DOTLP) has a main objective, to minimize the interdepartmental travel costs among facilities and to minimize the rearrangement costs, by studying an individual layout for each distinctive period based on patients demand, subject to a set of constraints of distances, available areas, and non-overlapping facilities according to international medical standards and specifications. In this paper, we propose a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model for solving DOTLP. For this, we generate a set of data to determine the optimal positions as well as the orientations of facilities on several illustrative multi-section Operating Theater cases.