Resource-constrained machine scheduling with machine eligibility restriction and its applications to surgical operations scheduling

We study a problem arising from surgical operations scheduling and model it as a resource-constrained machine scheduling problem with machine eligibility restriction to minimize the makespan. By decomposing the problem into two sub-problems, we develop effective heuristic algorithms to solve the problem. We test the proposed algorithms on randomly generated instances as well as real data set from a large hospital. The numerical results show the effectiveness and potential practical value of the models and the algorithms.