Metaheuristics for the operating theater planning and scheduling: A systematic review

TL;DR

This systematic review analyzes 28 studies on metaheuristic algorithms for operating theater planning and scheduling, highlighting their characteristics and suggesting future research directions in this NP-complete problem domain.

Contribution

The paper provides a comprehensive review of metaheuristic approaches for operating theater scheduling, filling a gap in the literature by systematically comparing their features.

Findings

Metaheuristics are widely used for complex scheduling problems.

28 papers were reviewed focusing on problem and solution characteristics.

Future research directions include hybrid approaches and problem-specific adaptations.

Abstract

There are found a vast number of papers studying the problem of operating theater planning and scheduling. Different variants of this problem are generally recognized to be NP-complete; thus, several solution approaches have been utilized in the literature to confront with these complicated problems. The lack of a thorough review of the main characteristics of solution approaches is tangible in the literature (reviewing them separately and with regards to the characteristics of studied problems), which can provide pragmatic guidelines for practitioners and future research projects. This paper aims to address this issue. Since different types of solution approaches usually have different characteristics, this paper focuses only on metaheuristic algorithms. Through both automatic and manual search methods, we have selected and reviewed 28 papers with respect to their main problem and solution approach features. Finally, some directions are introduced for future research.