Date: 18^th April, 2019

Time: 10:00-11:00 a.m.

Venue: Room 1102, The Main Building of School of Management, Zhejiang University

【Speaker Introduction】: Professor Jim Dai holds a Presidential Chair at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, co-director of the Institute for Data and Decision Analytics. He is currently the Leon C. Welch Professor at Cornell University. Dai studies efficient resource allocation models in processing networks that model service systems such as customer contact centers, data centers, hospital patient flow management, airline yield management, and ridesharing networks.

【Seminar Abstract】：Prolonged waiting time for admission from emergency department (ED) to inpatient beds is a leading cause of ED overcrowding and can negatively impact patient safety. In this talk, (a) I will review and compare two service time models that attempt to capture time-of-day effect of the waiting time; they are the two-time-scale service time model of Shi et al (2016) and the inspection-delay service time model of Chan, Dong and Green (2016). (b) I will demonstrate the role of Stein method to generate approximations for waiting time performance that is accurate in a variety of parameter regimes. (c) I will discuss the recent effort in developing approximate dynamic programming algorithms to optimize the trade-off between waiting time and the fraction of patients who are assigned to non-primary beds.