24 S. Neyshabouri, B.P. Berg / European Journal of Operational Research 260 (2017) 21–40
Additionally, RO methodology provides means to obtain solutions
that are protected against uncertainty. This characteristic is of
particular interest in health care settings like surgery planning
since the outcome of not considering these sources of uncertainty
can have a serious impact on the health outcome of the patients.
RO provides decision-makers with high quality solutions that,
while minimizing the operating costs, guarantee a high level of
safety and quality of care for patients. The use of cardinality-
constrained uncertainty sets in health care settings and their
benefits and drawbacks are considered by Addis et al. (2015) . The
authors address the operating room planning problem, and the
nurse-to-patient assignment problem in home care services using
the proposed cardinality-constrained uncertainty.
Similar to two-stage stochastic programs ( Birge & Louveaux,
2011 ), two-stage (adaptive) robust optimization addresses cases
when decisions can be split into two different sets. First, there
are the here-and-now decisions that have to be made prior to the
realization of the uncertainty. After the uncertainty is realized,
wait-and-see decisions are made. These are the recourse decisions
that are made to correct for the impact of the uncertainty. In
contrast to stochastic programming methods where the realization
of uncertainty is a product of a stochastic process (e.g., sample
from a distribution or simulation), the realization of uncertainty in
the RO methodology is a product of an optimization model.
Ben-Tal, Goryashko, Guslitzer, and Nemirovski (2004) state that
in cases where recourse actions are available, two-stage robust
optimization problems produce better solutions than the static
version. They show most cases of two-stage RO problems are
NP-hard and propose to restrict recourse solutions to be affine
functions of uncertain data and then show cases where this
restriction produces tractable optimization problems. They apply
the proposed approximation to an inventory problem and solve
the resulting reformulation as a linear program. Later in Atamtürk
and Zhang (2007) a two-stage robust optimization approach for a
network design problem where demand is uncertain is proposed.
Theoretical complexity results and special cases are also presented.
The methodology is applied to various problems such as lot-sizing
and location-transportation. Thiele, Terry, and Epelman (2009) pro-
pose a general framework for two-stage robust LP problems. To
solve these problems, an algorithm based on Kelley’s cutting-plane
algorithm ( Kelley, 1960 ) is proposed. Gabrel, Lacroix, Murat, and
Remli (2014a) formulate the location-transportation problem with
demand uncertainty using a two-stage robust formulation. A
cutting-plane algorithm is used to obtain solutions. Zeng and
Zhao (2013) propose a column-and-constraint generation method
to solve two-stage robust problems and show that the solution
methodology performs better than the cutting-plane methods
proposed by Gabrel et al. (2014a) and Thiele et al. (2009) when
applied to location-transportation problems. In addition, they
provide theoretical results that show their proposed algorithm has
a superior worst-case complexity as compared with one proposed
by Thiele et al. (2009) . For more information regarding adaptability
in robust optimization and its approximations, readers are referred
to Bertsimas et al. (2011) and references there in.
There is not much literature on two-stage robust optimization
problems with mixed-integer recourse structure. Zhao and Zeng
(2012) propose a formulation, conditions, and a solution method
based on their column-and-constraint generation method ( Zeng &
Zhao, 2013 ) to obtain provably optimal solutions to this class of
problems. Approximation methods based on finite adaptability for
two-stage and multi-stage RO problems are proposed in Bertsimas
and Caramanis (2010) (see also Bertsimas et al., 2011 and refer-
ences therein). Although the recourse decisions in the SICU are
in the form of number of patients and restricted to be integer,
thanks to our novel formulation the integrality constraints can be
relaxed.
In our study, we base our theory on the work of Bertsimas
and Sim (2004) , Thiele et al. (2009) , Gabrel et al. (2014a) , and
Zeng and Zhao (2013) . We propose a novel two-stage robust
formulation to model surgery planning with downstream resource
capacity. Both surgery durations and LOS in the SICU are uncertain
parameters. Our formulation naturally decomposes the problem
into sub-problems for ORs and downstream units. We propose a
column-and-constraint generation algorithm to solve this problem.
The formulation can be used in other important applications such
as project management, manufacturing, etc., where downstream
resources are shared by multiple entities.
3. Model development
In this section, the model development for planning of surgery
and downstream capacity under uncertainty is presented. First,
some notation and a deterministic formulation is presented.
Next, we define our model of uncertainty in detail. Finally, the
robust formulation to model this problem is presented. We go in
depth to study the structure of the proposed formulation and its
characteristics in the subsequent section.
3.1. Definitions and deterministic formulation
We define set B as the set of surgery blocks in a given decision
period (usually a week or two weeks long). Set S defines the set of
specialties that are included in the cyclic schedule. Each block, b
∈ B , is dedicated to only one type of specialty while there can be
multiple blocks of the same specialty during a cycle in the surgery
schedule. B
s
is used to denote the set of blocks for specialty
s during the planning horizon. Set I = { 1 , . . . , n } represents the
elective surgery patients. Set I
s
⊆ I represents the set of patients
that require specialty s . Note that each patient is assigned to one
specialty. Therefore patient i of specialty s can be assigned to any
of the blocks b ∈ B
s
during the planning horizon. We assume,
without loss of generality, that the length of the planning horizon
is T days and is an integer multiple of the surgery schedule cycle
length. Each surgery block b has a pre-allocated length of time
which is denoted by h
b
on a specific day t
b
. Due to uncertainty
in surgery times, a surgery block may need to use extra time
to finish the scheduled surgeries. Therefore overtime cost c
s
for
each unit of time is incurred for specialty s . For ease of modeling,
a dummy block b
∈ B , is considered for patients who are not
assigned to any surgery blocks during the planning horizon T and
are postponed be assigned to surgery during the next planning
horizon. The cost of assigning patient i to each block is defined
as a
ib
, where a
ib
< a
ib
∀ b = b
. This represents the admission costs
for each patient considering their waiting times and priorities.
Associated with each patient i , there is the length-of-stay l
i
which denotes the number of consecutive days that the patient
is required to stay in the SICU. In addition, there is the surgery
duration d
i
, which represents the time required to perform the
surgery for patient i . The SICU has limited number of beds on each
day, represented by r
t
. In the case of lack of capacity in the SICU,
a patient will be denied admission to the SICU and/or has to be
transferred to units with lower level of care. The cost incurred for
each day a patient is not receiving the care in the SICU is denoted
by e
t
. Table 1 summarizes the list of sets and parameters used in
our model.
To formulate the problem, we define x
sib
be equal to one if
patient i with specialty s is assigned to perform surgery on block
b , and is set to zero otherwise. y
it
is one if patient i is in need of
a SICU bed on day t , and is zero otherwise. Continuous decision
variable o
b
captures the amount of overtime incurred during the
surgery in block b . u
t
counts the number of patients on day t that