Can your business operations be optimized?

Optimization cases in Healthcare, Construction, and Agriculture.

If your company belongs to the healthcare, construction, or agriculture industry, you might be interested in optimizing operations in your company to maximize your profit with the techniques in Operation Research.

Operation Research application in Healthcare.

Operation Research can be described as the discipline of applying advanced analytical methods to help making better decisions.

The main approach used in Operation Research is Mathematical Programming, by transforming problems into mathematical formulation, we can solve different optimization problems with linear and non-linear programming, stochastic programming, and stochastic dynamic programming to make better decisions.

Optimization problems in healthcare have received considerable attention for more than three decades. With increasing average longevity and higher demand level for healthcare services, optimization issues in healthcare have become noticeably important especially for resource allocation, strategic planning and operational issues such as resource scheduling and treatment planning.

For example:

• How to decide on the best locations of medical clinics and emergency vehicles for providing maximum healthcare coverage to a given population?
• How many base locations of medical ambulances are needed if the total distance from the locations to the hospitals must be less than a given number?
• How should the nurses in a medical centre be scheduled and re‐rostered to maintain an adequate service level even in the worst‐case scenario or pandemic?
• How should radiation treatment be planned for minimizing the treatment time of a cancer patient?

Problems like these are complex and need to be addressed, and operations research provides numerous approaches and techniques for tackling them.

The four main areas for healthcare are healthcare planning, healthcare management and logistics, specialized and preventive healthcare, and healthcare practice.

The following are some healthcare optimization that using operation research method to achieve:

• estimate the future demand for services to build enough capacity in advance
• select hospital locations for covering a target population
• determine the best base location of a limited number of emergency vehicles for optimizing service levels
• generate the schedules considering selection of patients; assign patients to the staff, and schedule the patients throughout the day
• assign shifts to nurses who have different skills
• determine optimal stock levels of products restricted by the space, delivery and criticality of the items
• evaluate cost and effectiveness to initiate kidney dialysis therapy to optimize therapy strategy and patient welfare

Operation Research Methodologies in Construction.

Within the construction industry, linear programming methodologies are applied to allocate resources and to develop plans on how to use these resources. While linear programming is primarily used for construction budget allocation problems, integer programming is mainly used for worker-scheduling problems.

The method has gained increasing popularity as a competition among construction materials suppliers intensified and customers care more about the quality of the construction. The goals of optimizing construction problems have shifted from minimizing costs or maximizing tenants/building owner satisfaction to a hybrid, which encompasses both.

The method can be used to generate solution for construction problems including:

• forecasting building maintenance service demand and securing resources construction worker resource planning
• special stochastic human resource scheduling for minimizing the expected shortage of missing construction workers
• optimal materials and resource allocation based on a decision model
• develop building phase schedules in regards to the availability of the workforce
• find optimal number of construction workers to train, promote, and recruit
• find out the minimal cost of a standardized construction

Operation Research Methodologies in Agriculture.

Since agriculture is an industry involving a large number of decisions to be taken in the presence of the aspect of uncertainty, Operation Research techniques have been around in the agricultural management sector since the 50s, approaching decision problems that range from more strategic level planning to farm operation issues and integrated supply chain.

A mathematical programming based solutions for agriculture could be:

• set optimal irrigation levels with limited water supply
• simulate water transport and crop growth
• optimize cropping pattern to give maximum earnings
• optimize agricultural production with a given conditions
• find optimal location and size of warehouses for grain storage
• optimize number, size, and location of large-scale cattle-slaughtering and processing plants
• find optimal location of fruit packing and processing plants

How can we help?

SOLVD can help you to engage with the optimization team at the university. Please email us at solvd@wlv.ac.uk if you wish to be notified of future digital technologies events for SMEs, or to get in touch with our experts. Digital problem? SOLVD!

Blog by Ming Jing Yao, Research and Innovation Graduate member of the SOLVD Team at The University of Wolverhampton.

Reference

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