An ASP based solution for operating room scheduling with surgical teams in hospital environments

The optimization of daily operating room surgery schedule can be problematic because of many constraints, like to determine the start time of different surgeries and allocating the required resources, including the availability of surgical teams for complete surgical procedures. Recently, Answer Set Programming (ASP) has been successfully employed for addressing and solving real-life scheduling and planning problems in the health-care domain. In this paper we present an enhanced solution using ASP for scheduling operating rooms taking explicitly into consideration availability of surgical teams, that include a surgeon and an anesthetist in different specialties for the entire duration of the surgery. We tested our solution on different benchmarks with realistic parameters for schedule's length up to the target 5-days planning. The results of our experiments show that ASP is a suitable methodology for solving also such enhanced problem.