A scenario-based robust optimization approach for surgeries scheduling with a single specialised human resource server

This paper addresses a surgeries scheduling problem with a single server in charge of key medical facility. A surgery can be processed with a precedent setup by the server on one of available operating rooms. The setup can be processed at only one surgery at any time. Thus, it is critically important to simultaneously consider the setup precedence and operating room scheduling decisions. A robust model is presented for the problem to minimize the makespan associated with an uncertainty set for surgery durations. In order to verify the developed model and evaluate the performance of the proposed robust model, a number of test problems are generated, and a commercial optimization solver is used to solve these problems. Experimentation shows that incorporating uncertainty via scenarios decreases makespan when compared to deterministic scheduling methods.