Reducing Boarding in a Post‐Anesthesia Care Unit

When operating room schedules in hospitals are produced, the constraints and preferences of surgeons and hospital workers are a primary consideration. The downstream impact on post‐operative bed availability is often ignored. This can lead to the boarding of patients overnight in the post‐anesthesia care unit (PACU) because intensive care unit beds are unavailable. In this paper, we apply integer programming and simulation to develop improved surgical scheduling assignments. We want to balance new surgeries with hospital discharges in order to reduce the variability of occupied beds from one day to the next and, as a result, to reduce boarding in the PACU.     

PORTFOLIO MODELING IN MULTIPLE-CRITERIA SITUATIONS UNDER UNCERTAINTY: COMMENT

In a recent issue of Decision Sciences, Muhlemann, Lockett, and Gear [8] developed a multiple-objective, stochastic linear programming formulation of the multiperiod portfolio selection problem under uncertainty. The purpose of this note is to offer some extensions to their multicriteria approach which is otherwise viewed as an excellent attempt at modeling realistic aspects of the portfolio selection problem. Further, integer goal programming combined with simulation is suggested as an alternate approach for solving the dynamic multiple-objective problem.