Operating Room (Re)Scheduling with Bed Management via ASP

TL;DR

This paper presents an Answer Set Programming (ASP) based solution for operating room scheduling and bed management, demonstrating its effectiveness and scalability for hospital environments with real-world constraints.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel ASP-based approach for OR scheduling and rescheduling, including a web framework for real-time problem management.

Findings

ASP is effective for small to medium hospital scheduling.

Solution scales up to 15-day planning horizons.

Web framework enables real-time interaction with scheduling problems.

Abstract

The Operating Room Scheduling (ORS) problem is the task of assigning patients to operating rooms, taking into account different specialties, lengths and priority scores of each planned surgery, operating room session durations, and the availability of beds for the entire length of stay both in the Intensive Care Unit and in the wards. A proper solution to the ORS problem is of primary importance for the healthcare service quality and the satisfaction of patients in hospital environments. In this paper we first present a solution to the problem based on Answer Set Programming (ASP). The solution is tested on benchmarks with realistic sizes and parameters, on three scenarios for the target length on 5-day scheduling, common in small-medium sized hospitals, and results show that ASP is a suitable solving methodology for the ORS problem in such setting. Then, we also performed a scalability analysis on the schedule length up to 15 days, which still shows the suitability of our solution also on longer plan horizons. Moreover, we also present an ASP solution for the rescheduling problem, i.e. when the off-line schedule cannot be completed for some reason. Finally, we introduce a web framework for managing ORS problems via ASP that allows a user to insert the main parameters of the problem, solve a specific instance, and show results graphically in real-time. Under consideration in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).