Operating Theatre Scheduling Using Lagrangian Relaxation

This paper addresses the surgery operation scheduling problem. Two types of resources are considered, operating rooms and recovery beds. Each patient first visits an operating room for surgery operation and is transferred to a recovery room immediately after the surgery operation. The operating room needs to be cleaned after the surgery operation before starting another operation. The problem consists in assigning patients to operating rooms and recovery beds in order to minimize the sum over all patients of one defined function of their completion times. According to this, the problem is NP hard problem. A Lagrangian relaxation approach is proposed in this paper to determine a near optimal schedule and a tight lower bound. Numerical results are presented to show the efficiency of the method