A pattern based, robust approach to cyclic master surgery scheduling

The Master Surgery Scheduling problem consists of finding a suitable allocation of operating resources to surgical groups. A myriad of variants of the problem has been addressed in literature. Here we focus on two major variants, arising during a cooperation with Sykehuset Asker og B'rum HF, a large hospital in the city of Oslo. The first variant asks for balancing patient queue lengths among different specialties, whereas the second for minimizing resort to overtime. To cope with these problems we introduce a new mixed integer linear formulation and show its beneficial properties. Both problems require the estimation of demand levels. As such estimation is affected by uncertainty, we also develop a light robustness approach to the second variant. Finally we present computational results on a number of real-world instances provided by our reference hospital.