A Comprehensive Location-Allocation Method for Specialized Healthcare Services

This paper focuses on the development, solution, and application of a location-allocation model for specialized health care services such as the treatment and rehabilitation necessary for strokes or traumatic brain injuries. The model is based on our experience with the Department of Veterans Affairs’ integrated service networks. The model minimizes the total cost borne by the health system and its patients and incorporates admission acuity levels, service proportion requirements, and admission retention rates. A common resource constraint is introduced at the facility level since treatment of multiple acuity levels involves the pooling of common resources. Realistic instances of the model with 20 potential service locations, 50 admission districts and up to five open treatment units for three levels of severity are solved in about 300 seconds. The applicability of the model is tested by an extensive managerial experiment using data derived from one of the Department of Veterans Affairs specialized healthcare services. We investigate the effects of five critical factors: (1) the degree of service centralization, (2) service level mandates by acuity, (3) lost admission cost by acuity, (4) facility overload penalty cost by acuity and (5) target utilization level by acuity and treatment unit. We examine the countervailing forces present in making healthcare service location decisions and the resulting tradeoffs from the implicitly multiobjective nature of the system. The experiment and analysis demonstrate that the major factors of the experiment have a significant bearing on the optimal assignment of admission districts to treatment units

Maritime Empty Container Repositioning with Inventory-based Control

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Models for intermodal depot selection

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Ocean Engineering, 1997.Includes bibliographical references (p. 154-157).Qiang Gao.Ph.D

New optimization models for empty container management

This thesis investigates the reasons why nowadays empty container repositioning represents a crucial issue for the shipping industry. Moreover, taking into account information collected through surveys and meetings with industrial experts, we provide a broad overview of current logistic practices for the management of empty containers in the context of international trade. We develop new optimization models in order to support shipping companies in dealing with empty container repositioning. We determine optimal repositioning plans within the time limits imposed by planning operations. Some optimization models have been tested on real data problems provided by a shipping company. These results show that it is possible to achieve significant savings in costs and times requested to determine repositioning plan

Métaheuristiques de recherche avec tabous pour le problème de synthèse de réseau multiproduits avec capacités

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal