The OR planner

Smarter OR planning with optimization and manual control

The OR Planner is a project developed for LUMC to support hospital operating room planners in building and maintaining realistic surgery schedules.

The challenge
In many hospitals, OR planning is still largely done by hand. Planners have to balance many constraints at once, which makes scheduling difficult. The result is not just inefficiency: patients can wait months for surgery while operating rooms still remain underused. This increases pressure on staff, waiting lists, and hospital capacity.

The solution
OR Planning combines automatic schedule generation with hands-on planner control in one interface. It helps planners create weekly schedules based on key constraints and refine them manually where needed. Rather than replacing human judgment, the system supports planners by responding more effectively to change and making better use of available operating room capacity.

How the model works
Before generating a weekly schedule, planners can tune the optimizer through a set of adjustable sliders. These settings determine how the model balances competing priorities such as throughput, urgency, waiting time, workload distribution, fairness, surgeon preferences, overtime, and schedule compactness. This allows hospitals to generate schedules that better match their own operational priorities, rather than relying on a single fixed planning logic.