Abstract: Operating Room (OR) departments are one of the costliest and most revenue-generating departments in the hospitals. Due to limited resources, increasing demand, and conflicting priorities, managing an OR department is a challenging task. Having an efficient OR planning and scheduling technique is one way to manage the OR departments. OR planning and scheduling problem deals with how to allocate limited resources to minimize cost and improve quality of care and service. The use of deterministic procedures such as surgical durations is not an effective tool since uncertainty is one of the factors that highly affects the planning and scheduling of the patients in the OR departments. This study focuses on the minimization of costs in ORs and improving the waiting time of patients by developing mathematical models.

Key words: scheduling, operating rooms, healthcare, operations research

JEL code: C61