Guohua Wan, Distinguished Professor, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Yuhong Dai, Professor

Design of Patient Visit Itineraries in Tandem Systems

20:00-21:00 March 9 (Thursday), Tencent Meeting: 783-2705-7034

Multi-stage service is common in healthcare. One widely adopted approach to manage patient visits in multi-stage service is to provide patients with visit itineraries, which specify individualized appointment time for each patient at each service stage. We develop the first optimization modeling framework to provide each patient an individualized visit itinerary in a tandem (healthcare) service system. Due to interdependence among stages, our model loses those elegant properties (e.g., L-convexity and submodularity) often utilized to solve the classic single-stage models. To address these challenges, we develop two original reformulations. One is directly amendable to off-the-shelf optimization software and the other is a concave minimization problem over a polyhedron shown to have neat structural properties, based on which we develop efficient solution algorithms. In addition, we propose an approximation approach with provable optimality bound and numerically validated performance to serve as an easy-to-implement heuristic. A case study populated by data from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute shows that our approach makes a remarkable 27% cost reduction over practice on average.

报告人简介：万国华，上海交通大学特聘教授，主要研究兴趣包括排序与调度的理论和算法、运营与供应链管理、企业信息管理。研究成果发表于Management Science, Operations Research, Mathematics of Operations Research, Production and Operations Management, INFORMS Journal on Computing等国际学术刊物。现任美国生产与运作管理学会（POMS）旗舰刊物Production and Operations Management的Senior Editor，Journal of Management Analytics（SSCI Q1）的执行副主编和《管理科学学报》领域编辑。