Simran Lakhani, a PhD scholar of IEOR, presented her research work "Offline Appointment Scheduling of Patients for a Scanning Facility Under High Demand", supervised by Prof Ashutosh Mahajan, at the 51st Operational Research Applied to Health Services (ORAHS 2025) conference held at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway from 05th July to 11th July 2025. The talk discussed the appointment scheduling challenges for a high-demand hospital scanning facility. The study addresses two uncertainties: unforeseeable patient arrivals and random variations in scan durations across different patient types. The talk further discussed chance-constrained models for scheduling appointments in the offline setting, where the entire patient stream is known while scheduling appointments.
The work was presented in the Doctoral Colloquium (DC) held two days prior to the main conference. The DC was attended by several PhD students and experts in the field. After the presentation, the submission to the DC was discussed with a plenum of distinguished international researchers in the field, followed by one-on-one discussions with the experts and fellow PhDs. The conference being focused on OR applications in healthcare, provided her with the opportunity to discuss her work with the experts in this area. Additionally, several social events were organized throughout the conference to facilitate networking and build connections for future opportunities.
