This work studies the scheduling of elective procedures, with stochastic durations, in surgery rooms. Given a set of rooms with limited availability and a set of procedures, it must be decided in which room and when each procedure will be performed. The problem’s objectives are to maximize the use of the operating rooms and to minimize the delays in starting the scheduled surgeries. A simulation-optimization approach is proposed. First, procedures’ durations are modeled as random variables and a set of test percentiles (i.e. it is assumed that all surgeries will last as many minutes as the 75th percentile of its probability density function) is selected. Subsequently, using these durations as a parameter, a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP) is run. Consequently, as many solutions as selected test percentiles are generated. Finally, a Monte Carlo simulation is used to estimate three indicators: i) rooms utilization, ii) percentage of surgeries that had delays, and iii) average delay time of scheduled surgeries. The technique was tested by solving the elective procedures scheduling problem in a high-complexity hospital in Bogota. This hospital has 19 operating rooms and 35,000 surgeries performed annually. Currently, the scheduling process is manual. The simulation-optimization proposed approach allowed to determine the relation between utilization rate and delays in the service. As the occupation percentage increases, delay times also augment, implying a reduction of the service level. An average reduction of 5% in delay times entails a reduction between 3% and 9% of operating room occupancy.

Among the different tasks in production logistics, job scheduling is one of the most important at the operational decision-making level to enable organizations to achieve competiveness. Scheduling consists in the allocation of limited resources to activities over time in order to achieve one or more optimization objectives. Flow-shop (FS) scheduling problems encompass the sequencing processes in environments in which the activities or operations are performed in a serial flow. This type of configuration includes assembly lines and the chemical, electronic, food, and metallurgical industries, among others. Scheduling has been mostly investigated for the deterministic cases, in which all parameters are known in advance and do not vary over time. Nevertheless, in real-world situations, events are frequently subject to uncertainties that can affect the decision-making process. Thus, it is important to study scheduling and sequencing activities under uncertainties since they can cause infeasibilities and disturbances. The purpose of this paper is to provide a general overview of the FS scheduling problem under uncertainties and its role in production logistics and to draw up opportunities for further research. To this end, 100 papers about FS and flexible flow-shop scheduling problems published from 2001 to October 2016 were analyzed and classified. Trends in the reviewed literature are presented and finally some research opportunities in the field are proposed.

This paper tackles an extension to the Multi-activity Combined Timetabling and Crew Scheduling Problem (MCTCSP). The goal of the original problem is to schedule the minimum number of homogenous workers required, in order to visit a set of customers characterized by services needed against schedule availability. However, since in home services it is common to have specialized workers, a mathematical model considering a heterogeneous workforce is proposed. As a solution, a GRASP-based algorithm is designed. In order to test the metaheuristic performance, 110 instances from the literature are adapted to include categorical skills. In addition, another 10 instances are randomly generated to consider large problems. The results show that the proposed GRASP finds optimal solutions in 46% of the cases and saves 40–96% computational time.

Stochastic scheduling addresses several forms of uncertainty to represent better production environments in the real world. Stochastic scheduling has applications on several areas such as logistics, transportation, production, and healthcare, among others. This paper aims to evaluate the performance of various greedy functions for a GRASP-based approach, under stochastic processing times. Since simulation is used for estimating the objective function, two simulation techniques, Monte Carlo simulation and Common Random Numbers (CRN), are used to compare the performance of different greedy (utility) functions within the GRASP. In order to validate the proposed methodology, the expected total weighted tardiness minimization for a single machine problem was taken as case study. Results showed that both, CRN and Monte Carlo, are not statistically different regarding the expected weighted tardiness results. However, CRN showed a better performance in terms of simulation replications and the confidence interval size for the difference between means. Furthermore, the statistical analysis confirmed that there is a significant difference between greedy functions.