University of Twente Student Theses
Optimal time allocation of an orthopedic surgeon
Tsai, Eline (2017) Optimal time allocation of an orthopedic surgeon.
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| Abstract: | The goal of this project is to determine the optimal allocation of the outpatient department and operating room (OR) sessions per orthopedic surgeon. The amount of OR and OD sessions that can be distributed over the year is budgeted per surgeon. The allocation of these sessions influences the OR queue length. The optimal OR queue length is a trade-off between the waiting time of the patients in the OR queue and the amount of unused OR time. In general, hospitals aim at giving patients the best treatment as quickly as possible. Inefficient use of OR time leads to unnecessary health care costs. The system is modeled as a Markov chain and we use stochastic dynamic programming to determine the optimal allocation of the sessions. Performance measures are translated into queue length boundaries and uncertainties regarding a planning horizon are considered. The initial model is very detailed and computationally expensive, which is why several approximations and simplifications are proposed. These simplifications cause a significant reduction in the size of the state space and the computation time of the transition probabilities. Due to the complicated structure of the system, more research on approximation methods is needed. |
| Item Type: | Essay (Master) |
| Faculty: | EEMCS: Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science |
| Subject: | 31 mathematics |
| Programme: | Applied Mathematics MSc (60348) |
| Link to this item: | https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/73487 |
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