This paper considers scheduling of surgical operations across multiple operating rooms subject to the limited availability of anaesthetists. The objective is to construct a feasible operations schedule that has the minimum makespan, i.e., the completion time of all operations. We abstract the problem into a theoretical server scheduling problem and formulate it in a mathematical form by proposing an integer programming model. Due to the intractability of its computing time, we circumvent the exact approaches and develop two approximation methods. Then, the steepest descent search is adopted for improving the solutions. Computational study suggests that the proposed methods can produce quality solutions in a few seconds.
Keywords: anaesthesia scheduling; heuristic algorithm; integer programming; makespan.