  There are found a vast number of papers studying the problem of operating
theater planning and scheduling. Different variants of this problem are
generally recognized to be NP-complete; thus, several solution approaches have
been utilized in the literature to confront with these complicated problems.
The lack of a thorough review of the main characteristics of solution
approaches is tangible in the literature (reviewing them separately and with
regards to the characteristics of studied problems), which can provide
pragmatic guidelines for practitioners and future research projects. This paper
aims to address this issue. Since different types of solution approaches
usually have different characteristics, this paper focuses only on
metaheuristic algorithms. Through both automatic and manual search methods, we
have selected and reviewed 28 papers with respect to their main problem and
solution approach features. Finally, some directions are introduced for future
research.
