Operational Research: Methods and Applications

Throughout its history, Operational Research has evolved to include a variety of methods, models and algorithms that have been applied to a diverse and wide range of contexts. This encyclopedic article consists of two main sections: methods and applications. The first aims to summarise the up-to-date knowledge and provide an overview of the state-of-the-art methods and key developments in the various subdomains of the field. The second offers a wide-ranging list of areas where Operational Research has been applied. The article is meant to be read in a nonlinear fashion. It should be used as a point of reference or first-port-of-call for a diverse pool of readers: academics, researchers, students, and practitioners. The entries within the methods and applications sections are presented in alphabetical order. The authors dedicate this paper to the 2023 Turkey/Syria earthquake victims. We sincerely hope that advances in OR will play a role towards minimising the pain and suffering caused by this and future catastrophes

Operational Research: Methods and Applications

Throughout its history, Operational Research has evolved to include a variety of methods, models and algorithms that have been applied to a diverse and wide range of contexts. This encyclopedic article consists of two main sections: methods and applications. The first aims to summarise the up-to-date knowledge and provide an overview of the state-of-the-art methods and key developments in the various subdomains of the field. The second offers a wide-ranging list of areas where Operational Research has been applied. The article is meant to be read in a nonlinear fashion. It should be used as a point of reference or first-port-of-call for a diverse pool of readers: academics, researchers, students, and practitioners. The entries within the methods and applications sections are presented in alphabetical order

Operational research:methods and applications

Throughout its history, Operational Research has evolved to include a variety of methods, models and algorithms that have been applied to a diverse and wide range of contexts. This encyclopedic article consists of two main sections: methods and applications. The first aims to summarise the up-to-date knowledge and provide an overview of the state-of-the-art methods and key developments in the various subdomains of the field. The second offers a wide-ranging list of areas where Operational Research has been applied. The article is meant to be read in a nonlinear fashion. It should be used as a point of reference or first-port-of-call for a diverse pool of readers: academics, researchers, students, and practitioners. The entries within the methods and applications sections are presented in alphabetical order

Modelling Emergency Medical Services

Emergency Medical Services (EMS) play a pivotal role in any healthcare organisation. Response and turnaround time targets are always of great concern for the Welsh Ambulance NHS Trust (WAST). In particular, the more rural areas in South East Wales consistently perform poorly with respect to Government set response standards, whilst delayed transfer of care to Emergency Departments (EDs) is a problem publicised extensively in recent years. Many Trusts, including WAST, are additionally moving towards clinical outcome based performance measures, allowing an alternative system-evaluation approach to the traditional response threshold led strategies, resulting in a more patient centred system. Three main investigative parts form this thesis, culminating in a suite of operational and strategic decision support tools to aid EMS managers. Firstly, four novel allocation model methods are developed to provide vehicle allocations to existing stations whilst maximising patient survival. A detailed simulation model then evaluates clinical outcomes given a survival based (compared to response target based) allocation, determining also the impact of the fleet, its location and a variety of system changes of interest to WAST (through ‘what-if?’ style experimentation) on entire system performance. Additionally, a developed travel time matrix generator tool, enabling the calculation and/or prediction of journey times between all pairs of locations from route distances is utilised within the aforementioned models. The conclusions of the experimentation and investigative processes suggest system improvements can in fact come from better allocating vehicles across the region, by reducing turnaround times at hospital facilities and, in application to South East Wales, through alternative operational policies without the need to increase resources. As an example, a comparable degree of improvement in patient survival is witnessed for a simulation scenario where the fleet capacity is increased by 10% in contrast to a scenario in which ideal turnaround times (within the target) occur