A LOCAL SEARCH ALGORITHM FOR A PROBLEM OF SCALING SURGERIES IN HETEROGENEOUS OPERATING ROOMS

Hospital management involves complex activities, especially with regard to resource planning and management. In this context, the scheduling of surgeries in operating rooms requires high managerial effort, since inefficiencies in this process can result in underutilization of these resources and high levels of idleness. Therefore, this study proposes an algorithm based on local search to solve the Operating Room Escalation Problem, with the objective of minimizing the percentage of idleness under different operational constraints. Different constraints intrinsic to the real context were considered, including the heterogeneity of the operating rooms. The results obtained indicate that the method is capable of generating viable schedules in a low computational time, presenting an average level of idleness of 15.92% among the evaluated instances.