Scheduling elective surgery under uncertainty and downstream capacity constraints

The objective of this study is to generate an optimal surgery schedule of elective surgery patients with uncertain surgery operations, which includes uncertainty in surgery durations and the availability of downstream resources such as surgical intensive care unit (SICU) over multi-periods. The stochastic optimization is adapted and the sample average approximation (SAA) method is proposed for obtaining an optimal surgery schedule with respect to minimizing the total cost of patient costs and overtime costs. A computational experiment is presented to evaluate the performance of the proposed method.