Heuristics for the Maximization of Operating Rooms Utilization Using Simulation

This paper addresses the problem of maximizing the utilization of operating rooms, which is translated to jobs scheduling in an identical parallel machine environment with sequence-dependent setup times and an objective of minimizing the makespan. The jobs’ processing times and setup times are stochastic for better depiction of the real world. This is a non-deterministic polynomial time (NP)-hard problem, and in this paper a new heuristic is developed and compared to existing ones using simulation and optimization. The results and analysis obtained from the computational experiments proved the superiority of the proposed algorithm Longest Expected Processing with Setup Time (LEPST) over the other algorithms presented.