A System Development Lifecycle Approach for the Development of Decision Support Systems for Operating Rooms Planning and Scheduling Using Mathematical Programming, Heuristics, and Discrete Event Simulation

This paper describes an approach for developing decision support systems (DSS) for strategic and tactical operating room (OR) planning and scheduling problems. These problems involve assigning amounts of time and specific time blocks in the ORs to surgical specialties and/or surgeons. A four-phase iterative software development lifecycle (SDLC) approach is used to develop a DSS that has a graphical user interface, a data management system, and optimization and simulation systems that incorporate mathematical programming models, solution methods, and discrete event simulation models. Results from the computational experience show that the plans generated by the DSS utilize at least 78% of the available OR time on average and use the downstream recovery ward (RW) beds in a balanced way that never exceeds the number of available beds.