OPTIMAL SCHEDULE OF ELECTIVE SURGERY OPERATIONS SUBJECT TO DISRUPTIONS BY EMERGENCIES

This paper addresses the scheduling of elective surgeries in an operation theater that also treats emergent patients with priority when they arrive randomly. Two types of problems are considered: The first is in the short-term, the number of the patients for elective surgeries are fixed, all waiting at time zero for operations. The problem is to find the optimal policy to determine the order of all operations in waiting. The second is in the long-term, patients requiring surgeries of different types arrive randomly, and the problem is to determine the optimal policy to select the next elective surgery to operate. Optimal policies are derived for both types of problems based on the theory and techniques of stochastic scheduling and open bandit processes.