Abstract
In patients' healthcare, manual planning of operating rooms is very difficult due to having a large number of constraints that the planner should take into consideration. The aim of this paper is to solve the operating room scheduling problem using a hybrid Bees Algorithm. Our focus is to solve a two-level variant of the problem, the Master Surgery Scheduling Problem and the Surgical Case Assignment Problem, where both hospital cost and patient cost are considered. We use a hybrid population based meta-heuristic, namely, a Hybrid BA with Simulated Annealing. The performance of our algorithm is compared against a Tabu Search single solution based method from the literature using the same test data. The experimental results demonstrate the advantages of using our proposed approach.