In hospitals, the operating room (OR) is a particularly expensive facility and thus efficient scheduling is imperative. This can be greatly supported by using advanced methods that are discussed in the academic literature. In order to help researchers and practitioners to select new relevant articles, we classify the recent OR planning and scheduling literature into tables using patient type, used performance measures, decisions made, OR supporting units, uncertainty, research methodology and testing phase. Additionally, we identify promising practices and trends and recognize common pitfalls when researching OR scheduling. Our findings indicate, among others, that it is often unclear whether an article mainly targets researchers and thus contributes advanced methods or targets practitioners and consequently provides managerial insights. Moreover, many performance measures (e.g., overtime) are not always used in the correct context. Furthermore, we see that important information that would allow readers to determine whether the reported research results are relevant to them is often missing. In order to avoid these pitfalls, we conclude that researchers need to state whether they target researchers or practitioners, motivate the choice of the used performance measures and mention both setting and method specific assumptions.

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The planning of the operating rooms (ORs) is a difficult process due to the different stakeholders involved. The real complexity, however, results from various sources of variability entering the processes. These uncertain processes cannot be ignored since they greatly influence the trade-offs between the hospital costs and the patient waiting times. As a result, a need for policies guiding the OR manager in handling the trade-offs arises. Therefore, researchers have investigated different possibilities to incorporate non-elective patients in the schedule with the goal of maximizing both patient-and hospital-related measures. This paper reviews the literature on OR planning where both elective and non-elective patient categories are involved. It shows the various policies, the differences and similarities in the research settings and the resulting outcomes, whether they are beneficial or not. We find that the dedicated and the flexible policy are mostly pursued, but the setting and the assumptions of the reviewed papers vary widely. Decisions on both operational policies as well as on capacity are required to assure timely access and efficiency, which are the two main drivers for the problem at hand. Furthermore, the policy choice impacts the number of schedule disruptions and the OR utilization. However, results on the overtime and the patient waiting time are partly contradicting. The review shows that some policies have already received considerable attention, but the question of which policies are most appropriate is not yet fully answered. Neither has the full spectrum of policies been explored yet. Consequently, this topic provides several areas for future research, which are outlined throughout the paper.

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