Multiresource Allocation Scheduling in Dynamic Environments

Woonghee Tim Huh (), Nan Liu () and Truong Van-Anh ()
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Woonghee Tim Huh: Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z2, Canada
Nan Liu: Department of Health Policy and Management, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, New York 10032
Truong Van-Anh: Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027

Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, 2013, vol. 15, issue 2, 280-291

Abstract: Motivated by service capacity-management problems in healthcare contexts, we consider a multiresource allocation problem with two classes of jobs (elective and emergency) in a dynamic and nonstationary environment. Emergency jobs need to be served immediately, whereas elective jobs can wait. Distributional information about demand and resource availability is continually updated, and we allow jobs to renege. We prove that our formulation is convex, and the optimal amount of capacity reserved for emergency jobs in each period decreases with the number of elective jobs waiting for service. However, the optimal policy is difficult to compute exactly. We develop the idea of a limit policy starting at a particular time, and use this policy to obtain upper and lower bounds on the decisions of an optimal policy in each period, and also to develop several computationally efficient policies. We show in computational experiments that our best policy performs within 1.8% of an optimal policy on average.

Keywords: multiresource allocation; Markov decision process; healthcare operations management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (37)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormsom:v:15:y:2013:i:2:p:280-291

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