The present contribution focuses on the problem of assigning and scheduling surgical cases in rooms
of an operating theatre, in order to maximize efficiency. The aim is to schedule as many surgical
cases in as few operating rooms as possible, within regular operating theatre opening hours and under
limited resource availability. This work generalizes many surgical case scheduling aspects considered
in the literature and in practice by means of a unified resource model. The performance of a heuristic
algorithm designed for this rich problem formulation is evaluated and compared on a set of real-world
data. Computational results demonstrate the potential improvements obtained by using the presented
approach, over schedules constructed by human planners.