Minimizing the expected waiting time of emergency jobs
Publication date
2022-12-12
Document type
Forschungsartikel
Author
Fliedner, Malte
Organisational unit
Institute of Operations Management, Universität Hamburg
Scopus ID
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media
Series or journal
Journal of Scheduling
ISSN
Periodical volume
26
Periodical issue
2
First page
147
Last page
167
Peer-reviewed
✅
Part of the university bibliography
Nein
Language
English
Keyword
Machine scheduling
Non-elective surgery
Operating room scheduling
Queueing theory
Abstract
We consider a scheduling problem where a set of known jobs needs to be assigned to a set of given parallel resources such that the expected waiting time for a set of uncertain emergency jobs is kept as small as possible. On the basis of structural insights from queuing theory, we develop deterministic scheduling policies that reserve resource capacity in order to increase the likelihood of resource availability whenever an emergency job arrives. Applications of this particular scheduling problem are, for instance, found in the field of surgical operations scheduling in hospitals, where high-priority but uncertain emergencies compete for scarce operating room capacity with elective surgeries of lower priority. We compare our approaches with other policies from the literature in a comprehensive simulation study of a surgical operations unit.
Description
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Version
Published version
Access right on openHSU
Metadata only access