 Optimizing contracted resource capacity with two advance cancelation modesNa Geng and Xiaolan Xie European Journal of Operational Research, 2012, vol. 221, issue 3, 501-512 Abstract: Critical resources are often shared among different classes of customers. Capacity reservation allows each class of customers to better manage priorities of its customers but might lead to unused capacity. Unused capacity can be avoided or reduced by advance cancelation. This paper addresses the service capacity reservation for a given class of customers. The reservation process is characterized by: contracted time slots (CTS) reserved for the class of customers, requests for lengthy regular time slots (RTS) and two advance cancelation modes to cancel CTS one-period or two-period before. The optimal control under a given contract is formulated as an average cost Markov Decision Process (MDP) in order to minimize customer waiting times, unused CTS and CTS cancelation. Structural properties of optimal control policies are established via the corresponding discounted cost MDP problem. Numerical results show that two-period advance CTS cancelation can significantly improve the contract-based solution. Keywords: Healthcare; Hospital; Markov Decision Process; Capacity reservation; Advance cancelation (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:221:y:2012:i:3:p:501-512 DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2012.04.017 Access Statistics for this article European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier |
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