Quantitative decision technology can provide vital support for planning and decision making on all levels, ranging from strategic management to operative, day-to-day activity planning. While extensively used in the industry, such tools are not yet widely applied in the health care sector. Modern hospitals are complex organizations, with highly interconnected and complex planning problems. This, along with variations between hospitals makes the development of decision support tools for planning and management a challenging task.

Our research in optimization methods aims to contribute to the development of such tools. Our research is carried out through a variety of projects, ranging from blue-sky academic to applied industrial research.

Surgery Scheduling

In many hospitals, the surgery department is a significant cost driver. This is partly due to the expensive resources directly involved in surgery, but also due to the influence the management of operating rooms has on other activities and associated resources in the hospital. From a financial point of view, efficient surgery planning is important. Furthermore, improving surgery planning can also improve resource efficiency, reduce staff workload, reduce patients' waiting time, and reduce the number of surgery cancellations. This makes surgery planning a very important subject. Surgery planning is a highly complex process, involving a multitude of (often shared) resources, as well as a high degree of dynamics and uncertainty. The term surgery planning covers planning tasks at different levels of detail and time scale.

Shift Design

A prerequisite to high quality nurse rosters is an efficient shift design, which aims to find a set of shifts to match predicted work demand for a planning horizon while satisfying a set of constraints. Good shift design is important for the hospital (e.g., lowering cost, managing staff coverage, staff satisfaction) and its staff (e.g. healthy working shifts). The number of possible solutions for the shift design problem increases exponentially with the size of the problem and quickly becomes too large for an efficient manual approach.

Admission Planning 

The admission planning problem consists of: a set of surgeries to be performed; an initial plan, in which the date of some of these surgeries is fixed; a model of the hospital, including all relevant resources, their availability, relevant time constraints, and other requirements. The admission planning problem typically considers fewer resources than other stages of surgery scheduling that happen closer to the date of surgery. For admission planning, critical resources are typically surgeons, operating rooms, surgery teams, or care capacities in some parts of the care pathway.

Staff Scheduling

Staff scheduling is important for organizations like call centers, hospitals, ground crew, postal services and transportation companies. The task of staff scheduling is to match staff to shifts (working time) to meet the required staffing levels for a given planning horizon while considering laws, regulations, skills, fairness, and preferences. The output solution of the staff scheduling problem is a schedule of the working hours and off-time for the employees that provide an overview of staff utilization and related expenses.