An Approach for Automated Surgery Scheduling

Abstract

The planning of surgical operations forms a substantial el- ement of hospital management. It is characterized by high complexity, which is caused by the uncertainty between the capacity oer ed and the true demand. Also, as emergency cases occur the planning require- ments change. A semi-automated dialog-based system is therefore pre- ferred rather than either fully manual or fully automated systems. This is because of the inability of the later to recognize the changes in a high dynamic environment and to take the responsibility for decisions made. As it has to be possible to add new tasks in the planning process on the fly and to adequately plan new situations, we involve a human planner in the scheduling activity. The planner acts as a sensor to identify changes as they occur and integrates his knowledge as well as his decision-making competence into the planning process. The propos- als for the schedules are however made with the help of the heuristics. In order for a schedule to be accepted by those involved, it should take account of the interests and preferences of all the human actors. Existing systems do not do this and therefore suer from levels of non- acceptance of their resulting schedules. In this paper we discuss suitable heuristics for operating theatre scheduling, the limits to which preferences can be considered in the scheduling process, and the validation of the approach in an experimental set of hospital scenarios.