A broad range of optimization problems in applications such as healthcare operations, revenue management, telecommunications, high-performance computing, logistics and transportation, business analytics, and defense, have the following form. Heterogeneous service requests arrive dynamically and stochastically over slotted ...

To assess and monitor the progression dynamics of patients' depression severity conditions, Markov models are refined from other disease progression modeling methodologies to identify the characteristics and evolvement of disease severity state transitions among a cohort of patients. Explored in this thesis is an integrated ...

Networks are all around us, and they may be connections of tangible objects in the Euclidean space such as electric power grids, the Internet, highways systems, etc. Among the wide range of areas in the network analysis, finding critical component in the large scale complex networks is one of the most challenging but fascinating ...

Healthcare systems have attracted the attention of management and analysis due to their high percentage of the gross domestic product (GDP) and increasing rate of growth of expenditures. Within the various types of healthcare problems, this dissertation focuses on resource allocation decisions because they can significantly ...

Optimal control theory has been introduced as a powerful tool for approximately solving binary integer programming problems. In previous studies, an approach using continuous optimal control theory was developed, where the original binary integer problem was transformed into a continuous linear quadratic problem. However, the ...

In external beam radiotherapy for cancer, high-energy radiation is passed through the pa- tient’s body from an outside source to kill tumor cells. The challenge is that radiation also damages healthy tissue and organs-at-risk (OAR) in its path. The objective therefore is to devise treatment plans that maximize tumor-damage ...

Appointment scheduling systems have been studied for nearly 60 years. From a decision making point of view, related problems can be classified into two categories: static and dynamic. In a static scheduling problem, all decisions are made before a clinic session starts; in a dynamic scheduling problem, the schedule of future ...

The large product assembly industry is a complex and heavily manually based assembly manufacturing process. Examples are commercial airplanes, ships, and wind turbines. These manufacturing enterprises are increasingly striving to satisfy the individual needs of customers by providing customized products. Under this circumstance, ...

Low utilized resources is a common problem in the health care sector. As health care costs and the need for more efficient operations increases, managers are looking for new methods to increase the utilization of their resources. At Seattle Children's Hospital in Seattle, managers of the outpatient pediatric ambulatory care ...

Clinical laboratory testing is used for deriving patient diagnoses, monitoring treatment and predicting the expected outcome of a disease (prognosis). Thus, the performance of clinical laboratories is critical for our healthcare systems and it is determined by the precision and accuracy of the test results, turnaround time ...