Resources rationalization and reduction of waiting lists for surgery are two main guidelines for hospital units outlined in the Portuguese National Health Plan. This work is dedicated to a case study of an elective surgery scheduling problem arising in a Lisbon public hospital. In order to increase the surgical suite’s efficiency and reduce the waiting lists for surgery, two conflicting objectives are therefore considered: maximize surgical suite occupation and maximize the number of surgeries scheduled. This elective surgery scheduling problem consists of assigning an intervention date, an operating room and a starting time for elective surgeries selected from the hospital waiting list. Accordingly, a bicriteria surgery scheduling problem arising in the hospital under study is presented. To search for efficient solutions of the bicriteria optimization problem, the minimization of a weighted Tchebycheff distance to a reference point is used. A simple heuristic procedure specially designed to address the objectives of the problem is developed. At the talk, the authors present and discuss the results of computational experiments obtained with real data from the hospital. These results are also compared with previous results obtained with single criterion versions of the problem, which showed a very fast performance of the heuristics providing good quality solutions for each of the two objectives when independently considered. The study reveals that by using the present bicriteria approach it is possible to build surgical plans with better performance levels for both criteria. This clearly shows that the surgical plans currently practiced in the hospital represent dominated solutions to the planning problem and therefore non-efficient solutions in face of the criteria considered.

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Operating rooms, Elective case scheduling, Bicriteria optimization, Heuristics.