********************************************************************

                                                     Seminar

             Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management
                                  The Chinese University of Hong Kong

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Title	:	Optimal Capacity Control for Multiple Medical Diagnostic Facilities
Speaker	:	Prof. Michael Z.F. Li
		the Nanyang Business School
		Nanyang Technological University
Date	:	May 27th, 2008 (Tuesday)
Time	:	4:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.
Venue	:	Room 513
		William M.W. Mong Engineering Building
		(Engineering Building Complex Phase 2)
		CUHK

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Abstract:
　

Capacity management for expensive medical diagnostic facilities is critically important
in healthcare industries. In this paper, we examine multiple-facility problem with three
customer segments by studying the underlying stochastic dynamic control problem. Given
the arrival processes for inpatients and emergency patients and any appointment schedule
of outpatients, we first prove that the optimal rationing operator preserves the
concavity-based multimodularity property of the value function and further show that the
optimal control policies can be characterized by monotone switching curves. We also
present a 3-facility numerical example to illustrate the nature of the optimal control
policies by explicitly deriving the underlying switching curves. Finally, we propose two
tractable scheduling heuristics for outpatients, namely vertical scheduling and
horizontal scheduling, and evaluate their relative performances through numerical
examples under different cost and revenue structures.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Biography:
　

Michael Li is an associate professor of operations management at the Nanyang Business
School, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He had a PhD in Mathematics from the
University of Regina in 1989 and a PhD in Management from the University of British
Columbia in 1994. He had held various visiting positions in recent years at Shanghai
Jiaotong University, the University of British Columbia and Cornell University. His
primary areas of interests are in operations research and transport studies. His
publications have appeared in Canadian Journal of Statistics, European Journal of
Operational Research, International Transactions on Operational Research, Journal of Air
Transport Management, Journal of Pricing and Revenue Management, Journal of Theoretical
Probability, Transportation Research, and Transportation Science, among others.

************************* ALL ARE WELCOME ************************

Host	:	Prof. Chen Nan
Tel	:	(852) 2609-8237
Email	:	nchen@se.cuhk.edu.hk
Enquiries	:	Prof. Nan Chen or Prof. Sean X. Zhou
	:	Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management
		CUHK
Website	:	http://www.se.cuhk.edu.hk/~seg5810
Email	:	seg5810@se.cuhk.edu.hk

********************************************************************