Models for Capacity Allocation in Anticipation of Time-Varying Demand

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dc.contributor.advisorDiamant, Adam
dc.contributor.authorFurman, Evghenii S.
dc.date.accessioned2020-11-13T14:06:02Z
dc.date.available2020-11-13T14:06:02Z
dc.date.copyright2020
dc.date.issued2020-11-13
dc.date.updated2020-11-13T14:06:02Z
dc.degree.disciplineAdministration
dc.degree.levelDoctoral
dc.degree.namePhD - Doctor of Philosophy
dc.description.abstractIn this dissertation, we propose and investigate several stationary capacity allocation methods that anticipate time-varying demand. We apply these techniques to three practical settings in customer acquisition and retention, cloud computing, and healthcare. In the first part of this dissertation, we model the trade-off between customer acquisition and retention as a multi-class queueing network with returning customers, time-dependent arrivals, and abandonment. Based on its fluid approximation, we propose an approach to determine optimal stationary staffing levels by partitioning the time-limiting solution of the dynamical system. We test our method by applying it to two real-world applications, i.e., advertising campaigns and a clinical setting, and demonstrate its superiority when comparing to other state-of-the-art approaches. In the second part, we analyze a cloud computing system where a provider wants to determine the optimal number of servers and retrial interval for incoming jobs when all servers are busy. Servers in this setting represent components of a computer network and customers are jobs attempting to access the cloud computing infrastructure. By modeling the system as a fluid queue and using a calculus-of-variations approach, we derive the optimal amount of service capacity and retrial interval in anticipation of time-varying dynamics. We conduct a case study using data collected from a real cloud service provider and show that significant savings can be realized. Finally, we estimate the demand for personal protective equipment (PPE) in the general internal medicine (GIM) department of a hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic. We derive closed-form estimates of demand for multiple types of PPE using a queueing framework with generally distributed service times that models medical interactions with heterogeneous patients whose hospital admissions are time-varying. We parametrize our predictive model using a data set containing patients' clinical and operational records over a period of 9 years. We find that gloves and surgical masks represent approximately 90\% of predicted PPE usage. We also find that while demand for gloves is driven entirely by patient-practitioner interactions, 86\% of the predicted demand for surgical masks can be attributed to the requirement that medical practitioners will need to wear them when not interacting with patients.
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10315/38011
dc.languageen
dc.rightsAuthor owns copyright, except where explicitly noted. Please contact the author directly with licensing requests.
dc.subjectHealth care management
dc.subject.keywordsOperations Management
dc.subject.keywordsCapacity allocation
dc.subject.keywordsTime-varying demand
dc.subject.keywordsQueueing systems
dc.subject.keywordsFluid approximations
dc.subject.keywordsCustomer acquisition
dc.subject.keywordsRetention
dc.subject.keywordsService quality
dc.subject.keywordsCloud computing
dc.subject.keywordsService performance
dc.subject.keywordsHealthcare
dc.subject.keywordsPersonal protective equipment
dc.subject.keywordsCOVID-19
dc.subject.keywordsDemand estimation
dc.titleModels for Capacity Allocation in Anticipation of Time-Varying Demand
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation

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