An ASP-based solution for operating room scheduling with beds management

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 utmost importance for the quality of the health-care and the satisfaction of patients in hospital environments. In this paper we present an improved solution to the problem based on Answer Set Programming (ASP) that, differently from a recent one, takes explictly into account beds management. Results of an experimental analysis, conducted on benchmarks with realistic sizes and parameters, show that ASP is a suitable solving methodology for solving also such improved problem version.