Optimizing Forward Surgical Team Operating Room Scheduling for Mass Casualty Events

We solve the Forward Surgical Team (FST) Operating Room (OR) Scheduling Problem for Mass Casualty (MASCAL) events to determine the optimal OR surgical schedule for a single FST given deterministic, sequence-dependent OR setup times as to minimize the total length of the schedule by minimizing the total surgical setup time. We perform a two-part computational experiment to solve the problem of interest and compare four different methods (dynamic programming or DP, branch and bound or B&B, integer linear programming or ILP, and direct permutation heuristic or DPH) in terms of computational performance. The results of experiment suggest that the B&B performed best with the lowest computation times, while the DPH performed worst in terms of optimality gap. The DPH performed extremely well without time limitations and was easiest to implement using spreadsheet modeling, so we recommend its use for the future development of a decision-support tool for military medical planners.