In some hospitals, an “open scheduling” strategy is applied to solve the operating
room planning problem; i.e., surgeons can choose any workday for his surgical cases, and
the staffing of anesthetists and nurses is adjusted to maximize the efficiency of operating
room utilization. In this paper, we aim at obtaining an efficient operating program for an
operating theatre with several multifunctional operating rooms by using this “open scheduling”
strategy. First, a mathematical model is constructed to assign surgical cases to operating
rooms within one week. This model complies with the availability of operating rooms and
surgeons, and its objective is not only to maximize utilization of operating rooms, but to
minimize their overtime cost. Then a column-generation-based heuristic (CGBH) procedure
is proposed, where four different criteria are compared with each other so as to find a solution
with the best performance. In addition, the best approximate solution, obtained by this
CGBH procedure after running all the criteria proposed, is compared with the lower bound
obtained by an explicit column generation (CG) procedure, LP, to evaluate the distance
between the approximate solution obtained and the optimum one. Although no criterion,
according to the experimental results, is found superior to all other three in both robustness
and quality of the solution obtained, it is found that the best solution obtained among those
four criteria is often very close to LP, which means that the proposed algorithm can obtain a
near optimal solution. In one word, the CGBH procedure proposed in this paper can obtain
an efficient assignment of the surgical cases if the other resources (anesthesia and nursing
staff, equipment, beds in the recovery room and etc.) are well organized