Speaker: Dr. Shashi Mittal, Amazon.com
Time and Date: 930am, 18/4/13 (Thursday)
Venue: Room 217, Mechanical Engg. Building.
Abstract: The appointment scheduling problem arises in health care services, where two conflicting costs need to be minimized: the cost of under-utilization of high-cost installations (such as MRI scanners and operation rooms), and the cost of inconvenience to patients and the medical staff if a particular medical procedure starts late. Traditionally, the problem has been studied as a stochastic optimization problem. We present a novel robust optimization model for the problem. For each job, we are given its minimum and maximum possible execution times. The objective is to find an appointment schedule for which the cost in the worst case scenario is minimized. We present a simple heuristic, called the global balancing heuristic, which gives an optimal schedule under very general conditions. We also present a near-optimal ordering algorithm for the case where it is possible to change the order in which the jobs are scheduled.
This is joint work with Sebastian Stiller.
An up-to-date version of this paper is available on webpage:
http://web.mit.edu/mshashi/
Speaker's Brief Bio: Dr. Shashi Mittal completed his PhD at the Operations Research Center at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2011. Since then, he has been working as an Operations Research Scientist at Amazon.com, where he works on cutting-edge problems in the field of transportation network design and vehicle routing. His research interests are in combinatorial and non-linear optimization, with applications in scheduling, transportation and service operations.