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Surgical case scheduling is a key issue in the field of medician, which is a challenging work because of the difficulty in assigning resources to patients. This study regards the surgical case scheduling problem as a flexible job shop scheduling problem (FJSP). Considering the switching and preparation time of patients in different stage, an improved multi-objective imperialist competitive algorithm (IMOICA), which adopts the non-dominant sorting method, is proposed to optimize the whole scheduling. First, the social hierarchy strategy is developed to initialize the empire. Then, to enhance the global search ability of the algorithm, the concept of attraction and repulsion (AR) is introduced into the assimilation strategy. Moreover, to increase the diversity of the population, the revolution strategy is utilized. Finally, the variable neighborhood search (VNS) strategy is embedded to improve its exploitation capacity further. Experiments show that scheduling in advance saves time and cost, and IMOICA can solve the surgical case scheduling problem studied efficiently.

In this study, a distributed flow shop scheduling problem with batch delivery constraints is investigated. The objective is to minimize the makespan and energy consumptions simultaneously. To this end, a hybrid algorithm combining the wale optimization algorithm (WOA) with local search heuristics is developed. In the proposed algorithm, each solution is represented by three vectors, namely a job scheduling sequence vector, batch assignment vector, and a factory assignment vector. Then, an efficient neighborhood structure is applied in the proposed algorithm to enhance search abilities. Furthermore, the simulated annealing algorithm and clustering method are embedded to improve the global search abilities of the algorithm. Finally, 30 instances are generated based on realistic application to test the performance of the algorithm. After detailed comparisons with three efficient algorithms, i.e., ABC-Y, ICA-K, and IWOA NS , the superiority of the proposed algorithm is verified.