Essays in scheduling: Applications in health care and manufacturing.

摘要

The problem of finding an optimal schedule is ubiquitous in human endeavor. Airlines strive to find the best schedule for their aircrafts and flight-crews, academic scheduling offices at universities schedule classes, and business organizations prioritize their jobs or customers and schedule them accordingly. Even in our day to day lives, whether consciously or not, we decide on our daily schedule and go about our sequence of tasks, prioritizing certain tasks, and procrastinating on others. Not surprisingly, scheduling of people, tasks, and manufacturing jobs constitute a significant proportion of the operations management literature. Despite all the research that has been published on scheduling, we encounter scheduling problems that call for novel approaches, and when treated with appropriate tools and techniques, provide interesting managerial insights. The dissertation consists of three such scheduling problems, two from the health care industry, and one from manufacturing. The first health care paper (Ganguly et al. 2013) employs mixed-integer linear programming to schedule physicians for a medical emergency department (ED). The second paper (Ganguly and Samorani 2013) uses an analytical approach for making real time updates to patient schedules in outpatient clinics that primarily operate on an appointment basis. The paper on manufacturing (Ganguly and Laguna 2013) develops heuristic techniques for a particular type of job-sequencing problem that involves two types of setups.