Operating Rooms Decision Optimization Integrating Surgery Planning and Nurse Rostering

Operating room (OR) scientific management calls for an efficient decision making to determine the elective surgeries date and assign qualified nurses to shifts over a certain period. Such two decisions, the surgery planning and nurse rostering, are classified as the mid-term decision. They have mutual influence to each other but are solved independently in the literature. A mid-term OR decision optimization integrating surgery planning and nurse rostering is described and an ACO approach is proposed to solve such multi-objective optimization problem. The test case from the 10-days actual hospital operation data is used to evaluate the proposed approach. The comparison analysis shows the advantage of the integrated decision in balancing the daily surgeries quantity and the nurses’ workload.