Title

:

Optimal Capacity Control for Multiple Medical Diagnostic Facilities

Speaker

:

Prof. Michael Z.F. Li

Date

:

May 27th, 2008 (Tuesday)

Time

:

4:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.

Venue

:

Room 513

William M.W. Mong Engineering Building

(Engineering Building Complex Phase 2)

CUHK

Capacity management for expensive medical diagnostic facilities is critically important in healthcare industries. In this paper, we examine multiple-facility problem with three customer segments by studying the underlying stochastic dynamic control problem. Given the arrival processes for inpatients and emergency patients and any appointment schedule of outpatients, we first prove that the optimal rationing operator preserves the concavity-based multimodularity property of the value function and further show that the optimal control policies can be characterized by monotone switching curves. We also present a 3-facility numerical example to illustrate the nature of the optimal control policies by explicitly deriving the underlying switching curves. Finally, we propose two tractable scheduling heuristics for outpatients, namely vertical scheduling and horizontal scheduling, and evaluate their relative performances through numerical examples under different cost and revenue structures.

Michael Li is an associate professor of operations management at the Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He had a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Regina in 1989 and a PhD in Management from the University of British Columbia in 1994. He had held various visiting positions in recent years at Shanghai Jiaotong University, the University of British Columbia and Cornell University. His primary areas of interests are in operations research and transport studies. His publications have appeared in Canadian Journal of Statistics, European Journal of Operational Research, International Transactions on Operational Research, Journal of Air Transport Management, Journal of Pricing and Revenue Management, Journal of Theoretical Probability, Transportation Research, and Transportation Science, among others.

Host

:

Prof. Chen Nan

Tel

:

(852) 2609-8237

Email

:

nchen@se.cuhk.edu.hk

Enquiries

:

Prof. Nan Chen or Prof. Sean X. Zhou

:

Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management

CUHK

Website

:

http://www.se.cuhk.edu.hk/~seg5810

Email

:

seg5810@se.cuhk.edu.hk