Metaheuristics for the operating theater planning and scheduling: A systematic review
This is an incremental review that synthesizes existing literature to aid researchers and practitioners in healthcare operations management.
The paper conducted a systematic review of 28 papers to address the lack of a comprehensive analysis of metaheuristic algorithms for NP-complete operating theater planning and scheduling problems, providing guidelines for practitioners and future research.
There are found a vast number of papers studying the problem of operating theater planning and scheduling. Different variants of this problem are generally recognized to be NP-complete; thus, several solution approaches have been utilized in the literature to confront with these complicated problems. The lack of a thorough review of the main characteristics of solution approaches is tangible in the literature (reviewing them separately and with regards to the characteristics of studied problems), which can provide pragmatic guidelines for practitioners and future research projects. This paper aims to address this issue. Since different types of solution approaches usually have different characteristics, this paper focuses only on metaheuristic algorithms. Through both automatic and manual search methods, we have selected and reviewed 28 papers with respect to their main problem and solution approach features. Finally, some directions are introduced for future research.