Boosting Operating Theatre Utilisation Gains in Master Surgery Scheduling via Enhanced Genetic Algorithm with Naïve Seeds

This paper starts a series of research works dedicated to developing a practical and robust scheduling system for hospitals with operating capacities. The current goal is to ensure that a genetic algorithm can generate valuable solutions for operating theatre scheduling problems and optimise simple-to-implement schedules. Operating theatre is the most costly resource in hospitals, requiring highly coordinated action from caregivers to satisfy patient's needs and, at the same time, minimise idle time and overruns. Therefore, any tool that helps organise and structure patient flow saves time, money and effort both for a healthcare recipient and hospital administration. The work overviews existing medical resource scheduling methods and emphasises the advantages and disadvantages of some of the approaches. Based on the existing methods, the genetic algorithm with some unique features and enhancing strategies is presented. The algorithm experiments and tuning are performed on real-hospital records. The results show the advantage of the proposed genetic algorithm over manual and naïve scheduling approaches, proving the value of the genetic algorithm for scheduling operating theatres.