Operating theatre is always the most important and expensive sector of the hospital, and its surgical process management problem is always regarded as the kernel. In this paper, we focus on one of the surgical process management problems: block scheduling problem. An efficient weekly operating program is built for an operating theatre through two phases: at first the operating theatre weekly planning problem is solved with a heuristic procedure based on column generation procedure; then the operating theatre daily scheduling problem, based on the results from the first phase, is solved with a hybrid genetic algorithm. In the end, the proposed problem is tested and validated with randomly generated data, and then the numerical results are provided

Many government agencies and business organizations have realized that it is necessary to consider not only the economic cost but also the road transport emissions when they determine the transport policies and operations. In this study, a patient transportation problem with the aim of reducing transport emissions has been formulated by implementing CVRP model. In order to determine the routes of patient transportation with optimized emissions for targeted hospital, an improved Cuckoo Search (ICS) algorithm is proposed. In this study, a ‘split’ procedure has been implemented to simplify the individual’s representation. A new category of cuckoos has been introduced to improve the ICS’s search ability. Two heuristics have been applied to improve the quality of initial population. A local search mechanism has been embedded in the search procedure to improve the quality of solutions obtained at the end of each iteration. The computational results were encouraging and demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed solution method.