Preference-based Scheduling of Hospital Scenarios

The planning of surgical operations forms a substantial element of hospital management. It is characterized by high complexity, which is caused by the uncertainty between the capacity offered and the true demand. Also, as emergency cases occur the planning requirements change. In our approach the proposals for the schedules are made with the help of the heuristics. In order for a schedule to be accepted by those involved, it should take account of the interests and preferences of all the human actors. Existing systems do not do this and therefore suffer from levels of non-acceptance of their resulting schedules. In this paper we discuss suitable heuristics for operating theatre scheduling, the limits to which preferences can be considered in the scheduling process, and the validation of the approach in an experimental set of hospital scenarios.