A Robust Chance Constrained Approach to Surgery Scheduling

Abstract

We study elective surgery scheduling under uncertain procedure durations. Schedules based on mean durations or fixed buffering rules may appear efficient ex ante but become fragile in execution, as early overruns propagate through the day and expose later surgeries to accumulated delay. We propose a robust chance-constrained framework that separates uncertainty quantification from schedule optimization. A buffer engine converts distributional information into reliability-dependent buffered durations, while the scheduling model jointly selects assignments, sequences, start times, and surgery-level reliability levels from a discrete menu. Reliability therefore becomes an endogenous scheduling decision rather than a fixed service-level parameter. The framework accommodates average-reliability, worst-day, and hard-target risk postures. Comparisons with common-reliability and uniform proportional-buffer benchmarks show that the menu derives its value from exploiting surgery-level heterogeneity, allocating protection where it has the greatest operational value while avoiding unnecessary conservatism. In a rolling-origin case study at HLA Moncloa Hospital in Madrid, covering 10 instances with 45 to 227 surgeries, the approach reduces delays exceeding 90 minutes by 97%, lowers the 95th-percentile delay by approximately 620 minutes, and reduces total overtime by 42% relative to a deterministic mean-based baseline. By allocating buffers according to uncertainty and operational exposure, the framework translates heterogeneous duration data and risk preferences into schedules that are more reliable in execution and less conservatively buffered than one-size-fits-all rules.