Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

Empirical Analysis Of Volunteer Convergence Following The 2011 Tornado Disaster In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Emmett Lodree, Lauren B. Davis

Dr. Lauren B Davis

Tactical Allocation And Acceptance Of Multiple Patient Classes In The Presence Of No-Shows, Lauren Davis, Husniyah Abdus-Salaam

Dr. Lauren B Davis

Clinics that provide pediatric care are frequently confronted with family group appointment requests, where parents desire their children to be scheduled simultaneously or consecutively. This is potentially beneficial to the family by minimizing the number of trips to the provider’s office. However, offering prescheduled group appointments have the risk of reducing provider utilization, particularly if the entire group fails to meet their scheduled appointment. Similarly, reserving appointment slots for same day group appointment requests may also decrease utilization and impact profitability. This paper explores the impact of family group appointments on clinic performance in terms of provider utilization and profit. …

Scheduling Food Bank Collections And Deliveries To Ensure Food Safety And Improve Access, Lauren Davis, Irem Sengul, Julie Ivy, Luther Brock, Lastella Miles

Dr. Lauren B Davis

Food banks are privately-owned non-profit organizations responsible for the receipt, processing, storage, and distribution of food items to charitable agencies. These charitable agencies in turn distribute food to individuals at risk of hunger. Food banks receive donated food from national and local sources, such as The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) and supermarkets. Local sources with frequent high-volume donations justify the use of food bank vehicles for collection. Food bank vehicles are also used to deliver food to rural charitable agencies that are located beyond a distance safe for perishable food to travel without spoilage. Due to limited funds, food …

Prepositioning Commodities To Repair Maritime Navigational Aids, Jessye Bemley, Lauren Davis, Luther Brock

Dr. Lauren B Davis

Purpose - As the intensity of natural disasters increase, there is a need to develop policies and procedures to assist various agencies with moving aid to affected areas. One of the biggest limitations to this process is damage to transportation networks, in particular waterways. To keep waterways safe, aids to navigation (ATONs) are placed in various areas to guide mariners and ships to their final destination. If the ATONs are damaged, then the waterways are left unsafe, making it difficult to move supplies and recover from a disaster. The aim of this paper is to explore the effectiveness of prepositioning …

Inventory Planning And Coordination In Disaster Relief Efforts, Lauren Davis, Funda Samanlioglu, Xiuli Qu, Sarah Root

Dr. Lauren B Davis

This research proposes a stochastic programming model to determine how supplies should be positioned and distributed among a network of cooperative warehouses. The model incorporates constraints that enforce equity in service while also considering traffic congestion resulting from possible evacuation behavior and time constraints for providing effective response. We make use of short-term information (e.g., hurricane forecasts) to more effectively preposition supplies in preparation for their distribution at an operational level. Through an extensive computational study, we characterize the conditions under which prepositioning is beneficial, as well as discuss the relationship between inventory placement, capacity and coordination within the network.

Simulation-Based Evaluation Of Port Evacuation Plans For Predictable Natural Disasters, Xiuli Qu, Maurice Jackson, Lauren Davis

Dr. Lauren B Davis

Effective port emergency evacuation could reduce the potential damages and losses caused by a predictive natural disaster. Thus, most U.S. ports have evacuation plans or guidelines established for predictive natural disasters, especially hurricanes. However, hurricane Katrina still revealed that these existing emergency evacuation plans may not be as effective as originally expected. The objective of this study is to provide a quantitative approach to evaluating the effectiveness of port emergency evacuation plans for hurricanes. A discrete-event simulation model is developed in this study to capture the dynamic evacuation process in a complex port environment when a hurricane approaches a port. …

Impact Of Batch Appointments On No-Show Rates: A Public Versus Private Clinic Perspective, Husniyah Abdus-Salaam, Lauren Davis

Dr. Lauren B Davis

Much of the appointment scheduling literature has characterized the impact of no-show rates with respect to individual appointment requests. However, little is known about the impact of appointments that are grouped by household. This study is concerned with understanding the prevalence of these family group appointments and identifying the appointment characteristics that significantly influence no-show rates. Using historical data from a public and private pediatric clinic, Multiway Frequency Analysis is used to characterize the association between appointment characteristics and appointment size. A logistic regression model is also developed to identify the factors that contribute to no-show rates for both clinics. …

Evaluating The Effectiveness Of Prepositioning Policies In Response To Natural Disasters, Jarrett Chapman, Lauren Davis, Funda Samanlioglu, Xiuli Qu

Dr. Lauren B Davis

Recent natural disasters highlight the complexities associated with planning, coordination and distribution of supplies in a manner which provides timely and effective response. In this paper, we present a model to quantify the benefits associated with pre-positioning local supplies. We assume the supplies are in a high-risk location and may be destroyed if an appropriate strategy to protect the supplies is not implemented. A stochastic linear programming model is developed where the first-stage decision pre-positions existing supplies to minimize the supply loss. Second-stage decisions attempt to maximize the responsiveness of the system by allocating supplies to satisfy demand. The benefits …

A Heuristic Approach For Allocation Of Data To Rfid Tags: A Data Allocation Knapsack Problem, Lauren Davis, Funda Samanlioglu, Xiaochun Jiang, Daniel Mota, Paul Stanfield

Dr. Lauren B Davis

Durable products and their components are increasingly being equipped with one of several forms of automatic identification technology such as radio frequency identification (RFID). This technology enables data collection, storage, and transmission of product information throughout its life cycle. Ideally all available relevant information could be stored on RFID tags with new information being added to the tags as it becomes available. However, because of the finite memory capacity of RFID tags along with the magnitude of potential lifecycle data, users need to be more selective in data allocation. In this research, the data allocation problem is modeled as a …

Information Sharing In Capacity Constrained Supply Chains, Lauren Davis, Russell King, Thom Hodgson, Wenbin Wei

Dr. Lauren B Davis

We present a modelling approach for quantifying the value of information in supply chains using Markov decision processes (MDP). The case where information sharing occurs is modelled using a completely observable MDP. A restricted observation MDP is used to model the case where no information sharing occurs. We illustrate the use of this framework on a two-stage capacity-constrained supply chain consisting of a supplier and a retailer. We quantify the value of information sharing in this setting and construct several performance measures to identify the benefits to both the retailer and supplier as a result of the information sharing partnership.

Impact Of Demand Correlation And Information Sharing In A Capacitated Supply Chain With Multiple Retailers, Chanel Helper, Lauren Davis, Wenbin Wei

Dr. Lauren B Davis

This paper considers a single product, two-echelon capacity constrainedsupplychain consisting of a supplier and two retailers facing correlated end-item demand. We use a decentralized Markov decision process with restricted observations to represent this system and conduct a numerical study to quantify the benefits of information sharing to the retailers under varying levels of supplier capacity and supply allocation mechanisms. Our results show an inverse relationship between capacity and information and indicate the retailers can achieve significant benefits as a result of the information sharing partnership.

A Computationally Efficient Algorithm For Undiscounted Markov Decision Processes With Restricted Observations, Lauren Davis, Thom Hodgson, Russell King, Wenbin Wei

Dr. Lauren B Davis

We present a computationally efficient procedure to determine control policies for an infinite horizon Markov Decision process with restricted observations. The optimal policy for the system with restricted observations is a function of the observation process and not the unobservable states of the system. Thus, the policy is stationary with respect to the partitioned state space. The algorithm we propose addresses the undiscounted average cost case. The algorithm combines a local search with a modified version of Howard's (Dynamic programming and Markov processes, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1960) policy iteration method. We demonstrate empirically that the algorithm finds the optimal …