Abstract

In order to improve the operational efficiency in the Operating Room, hospitals customize surgical trays for each surgical procedure. Since, surgical procedures involve a variety of patients and surgeons, the usage of surgical instruments (in terms of quantity) differs from case to case. This poses a significant challenge as the variability in instrument usage makes it difficult to determine the optimal quantity for each instrument for each procedure. In this study, we address the issue of excessive waste in surgical trays by proposing the implementation of custom peel packs. These peel packs could be used (in place of a new surgical tray) if the surgical tray ran out of the instruments. Our objective is to reduce waste by designing custom peel packs associated with multiple surgical procedures while ensuring that all the necessary instruments are available during the procedure without opening a new main tray. We present one decomposition approach to finding the exact solution and a simplified fast approach based on clustering and mathematical programming to find the near-optimal solution in a fractional time compared to the exact approach. Numerical experiments demonstrate the performance of the presented approaches. The findings indicate that the proposed K-means based clustering method is very effective in configuring peel packs.