• 산업공학
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• 제24권4호
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• pp.274-280
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• 2011

Delayed access to surgery may lead to deterioration in the patient condition, poor clinical outcomes, increase in the probability of emergency admission, or even death. The purpose of this work is to decide the number of patients selected from a waiting list and to schedule them in accordance with the operating room capacity in the next period. We formulate the problem as an infinite horizon Markov Decision Process (MDP), which attempts to strike a balance between the patient waiting times and overtime works. Structural properties of the proposed model are investigated to facilitate the solution procedure. The proposed procedure modifies the conventional value iteration method along with the binary search technique. An example of the optimal policy is provided, and computational results are given to show that the proposed procedure improves computational efficiency.