Surgical scheduling under patients' uncertain anesthesia recovery time

For a medical system consisting of single operating room and single post anesthesia care unit, this paper studies the surgical scheduling problem under patients' uncertain anesthesia recovery time. The objective is to minimize the total idle time including operating room idle time and post anesthesia care unit idle time resulting from patients' too long or too short anesthesia recovery time. For given patients, surgical scheduling program can be found by means of Genetic Algorithm. The numerical simulation shows that executing surgeries for the patients who have longer expected anesthesia recovery time earlier can help to reduce total idle time.