Minimizing the Sum of Job Completion times for Washing Operations in Hospital Sterilization Services

In this paper, we deal with the problem of minimizing the sum of completion times for washing operations in hospital sterilization services. After use in operating rooms, reusable medical devices (RMD) are sent to the sterilization service which is composed of various processes. In the washing step, different sets of RMD, used for different operations, may be washed together without exceeding washer capacity. For organizational reasons, we are not allowed to split RMD sets. So, we consider a batch scheduling problem where RMD sets may have different sizes and different release dates for washing. Note that if all release dates are equal, the problem may be reduced to a bin packing problem. We provide a mixed integer linear programming model which aims at minimizing the sum of completion times for washing cycles. We provide and also experiment some heuristics based on classical bin packing algorithms.