Title: A hospital staff scheduling problem under stochastic operation times

Authors: Subhash C. Sarin; Hanif D. Sherali; Seon Ki Kim

Addresses: Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA ' Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA ' Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA

Abstract: This paper is concerned with a hospital staff scheduling problem wherein surgical operation times are stochastic. We formulate a complete recourse, scenario-based model for this problem, and develop a branch-and-cut (B&C) algorithm that is further hybridised with the Monte Carlo method (MCM). The proposed hybrid MCM-based approach is demonstrated to substantially reduce the required computational effort over a purely branch-and-cut methodology while producing near-optimal solutions having relatively small optimality gaps.

Keywords: hospital staff scheduling; Monte Carlo method; MCM; stochastic programming; hospitals; healthcare management; surgical operations; branch-and-cut algorithm; surgeons; operating rooms.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPS.2016.080337

International Journal of Planning and Scheduling, 2016 Vol.2 No.3, pp.210 - 232

Received: 07 Dec 2015
Accepted: 27 Apr 2016
Published online: 15 Nov 2016 *