Surgical case scheduling as a generalized job shop scheduling problem

Surgical case scheduling allocates hospital resources to individual surgical cases and decides on the time to perform the surgeries. This task plays a decisive role in utilizing hospital resources efficiently while ensuring quality of care for patients. This paper proposes a new surgical case scheduling approach which uses a novel extension of the Job Shop scheduling problem called multi-mode blocking job shop (MMBJS). It formulates the MMBJS as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) problem and discusses the use of the MMBJS model for scheduling elective and add-on cases. The model is illustrated by a detailed example, and preliminary computational experiments with the CPLEX solver on practical-sized instances are reported.