An ASP-based Approach to Master Surgical Scheduling.

The problem of finding Master Surgical Schedules (MSS) consists of scheduling different specialties to the operating rooms of a hospital clinic. To produce a proper MSS, each specialty must be assigned to some operating rooms. The number of assignments is different for each specialty and can vary during the considered planning horizon. Realizing a satisfying schedule is of upmost importance for a hospital clinic. A poorly scheduled MSS may lead to unbalanced specialties availability and increase patients’ waiting list, negatively affecting both the administrative costs of the hospital and the patient satisfaction. In this paper, we present a compact solution based on Answer Set Programming (ASP) to the MSS problem. We tested our solution on different scenarios: experiments show that our ASP solution provides satisfying results in short time, also when compared to other logic-based formalisms. Finally, we describe a web application we have developed for easy usage of our solution.