Saturation Degree-Based Constructive Heuristic for Master Surgery Scheduling Problem

Managing operating theatres (OT) is critical in achieving an effective health care delivery system. This includes the Master Surgery Scheduling Problem (MSSP), which assigns surgery groups such as medical specialties to OT time slots. Constructive heuristics for the MSSP have been incorporating greedy approaches to generate the solution. However, greedy methods tend to ignore hidden factors and could lead to solution infeasibility. Hence, motivated by other timetabling problems, this study incorporated the Saturation Degree ordering into a ranking-based constructive heuristic for solving the MSSP to improve solution feasibility. The proposed algorithm was benchmarked against the greedy and random approaches, as well as a regret-based approach from the literature and found that it has reduced repair mechanism usage by 57.43%. Furthermore, the ranking-based algorithm avoided infeasible solutions in all runs, whereas the greedy and regret-based approaches failed to do the same when using a greedy repair mechanism. Overall, this work has proved the efficacy of the Saturation Degree ordering in enhancing solution feasibility.