Adaptive Elective Surgery Planning Under Duration and Length-Of-Stay Uncertainty: A Robust Optimization Approach

Scheduling elective surgeries is a complicated task due to the coupled effect of multiple sources of uncertainty and the impact of the proposed schedule on the downstream units. In this paper, we propose an adaptive robust optimization model to address the existing uncertainty in surgery duration and lengthof-stay in the surgical intensive care unit. The framework allows for the decision-maker to adjust the level of risk she/he is comfortable. We propose the adapted column-and-constraint generation method to obtain exact solutions for the proposed formulation. The performance and the quality of our proposed solution methodology are tested through computational experiments and simulation modeling.