We model a system which consists of a stream of customers processed through three steps by two resources. The first resource, an investigator, handles the first step, in which she collects information from the customer and decides what work will be done in the second step by the second resource,...

Many intensive care units (ICUs) face overcrowding. One response to this overcrowding is to bump ICU patients to other departments of the hopsital to make room for new patient arrivals. Such bumping clearly has the potential to reduce quality care. In this paper we develop a stochastic model of...

The coordination of activities in a work context has been examined by many disciplines and in recent years the role of information systems and other artifacts has become increasingly prominent. The emergency department (ED) of a hospital in a large US city is used to study how information...

In this paper, we consider the problem of which products to offer and how to price them when the products are designed and manufactured using resources shared among them. We develop a model of costs that allows us to capture a wide range of complex interactions that arise when there are shared...

Providing the right staffing levels is of paramount importance in most service centers. Excess capacity is costly, yet a lack of sufficient capacity leads to unacceptably low service levels which may be even costlier. When determining staffing levels for a service center it is, therefore,...

We consider a firm that provides multiple services using both specialized and flexible capacity. The problem is formulated as a two-stage single-period stochastic program. The firm invests in capacity before the actual demand is known and optimally assigns capacity to customers when demand is...

Much of the literature on product line design or product line selection focuses on revenues or market share maximization, but in many cases, the true objective is to maximize profit. In this paper, we survey the literature on models that address decisions regarding the conceptual design of...