الفهرس 
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Abstract
Healthcare is becoming one of the fast growing industries all over the world. Hospitals in the developing countries have faced multiple challenges in the past decade. Consequently, hospitals are more and more aware of the need to use their resources as efficiently as possible, which urges healthcare organizations to increase emphasis on process optimization.
One of the most important problems in hospital management is the operating rooms scheduling problem. The problem of Operating Rooms (OR) scheduling can be divided into three different and related sub-problems namely: (i) the Case-Mix Problem (CMP); (ii) the master Surgery Scheduling Problem (MSSP); and (iii) the Surgery Scheduling Problem (SSP). The CMP refers to the amount of ORs time allocated to each patient category in order to maximize the total benefits. The MSSP is addressed at the tactical level and it is concerned with the development of the master Surgery Schedule (MSS), which is cyclically constructed for a given planning period (usually 3-months to 1-year). An MSS defines the allocated time blocks of each OR to the patient categories/surgeons. Finally, at the operational level, the SSP refers to assigning each surgical case a start time, a day, and an OR with the target of minimizing the waiting lists and maximizing resources utilization and ORs’ throughput