A Comprehensive Review and Analysis of Operating Room and Surgery Scheduling

A comprehensive review and analysis of operating room (OR) theatre scheduling problems as well as a comparison of solution approaches along with suggestions for future studies are presented in this work. A detailed scientometric analysis was performed, which is a powerful tool for conducting bibliometric analyses and comprehensive reviews. OR scheduling problems were categorized into three decision levels, including strategical, tactical, and operational levels. Since optimization of OR problems is an NP-hard optimization problem, we evaluated research studies that employed different mathematical and metaheuristic methods to address OR optimization problems. The comprehensive review presented in this work is divided into two sections. The first section is focused on mathematical modeling, including deterministic and uncertainty modeling, and the second section is focused on solution approaches. The latter section reviews single and multi-objective solution methods. An additional section of this paper is focused on application software that are developed to address the previously mentioned problems. The final section of the paper presents conclusions of this work.