Using operations research methodologies to improve operating theatre scheduling

A hospital consists of a number of wards, units and departments that provide a variety of medical services and interact on a day-to-day basis. Nearly every department within a hospital schedules patients for the operating theatre (OT) and most wards receive patients from the OT following post-operative recovery. Because of the interrelationships between units, disruptions and cancellations within the OT can have a flow-on effect to the rest of the hospital. This often results in dissatisfied patients, nurses and doctors, escalating waiting lists, inefficient resource usage and undesirable waiting times. The objective of this study is to use Operational Research methodologies to enhance the performance of the operating theatre by improving elective patient planning using robust scheduling and improving the overall responsiveness to emergency patients by solving the disruption management and rescheduling problem. OT scheduling considers two types of patients: elective and emergency. Elective patients are selected from a waiting list and scheduled in advance based on resource availability and a set of objectives. This type of scheduling is referred to as ‘offline scheduling’. Disruptions to this schedule can occur for various reasons including variations in length of treatment, equipment restrictions or breakdown, unforeseen delays and the arrival of emergency patients, which may compete for resources. Emergency patients consist of acute patients requiring surgical intervention or in-patients whose conditions have deteriorated. These may or may not be urgent and are triaged accordingly. Most hospitals reserve theatres for emergency cases, but when these or other resources are unavailable, disruptions to the elective schedule result, such as delays in surgery start time, elective surgery cancellations or transfers to another institution. Scheduling of emergency patients and the handling of schedule disruptions is an ‘online’ process typically handled by OT staff. This means that decisions are made ‘on the spot’ in a ‘real-time’ environment. There are three key stages to this study: (1) Analyse the performance of the operating theatre department using simulation. Simulation is used as a decision support tool and involves changing system parameters and elective scheduling policies and observing the effect on the system’s performance measures; (2) Improve viability of elective schedules making offline schedules more robust to differences between expected treatment times and actual treatment times, using robust scheduling techniques. This will improve the access to care and the responsiveness to emergency patients; (3) Address the disruption management and rescheduling problem (which incorporates emergency arrivals) using innovative robust reactive scheduling techniques. The robust schedule will form the baseline schedule for the online robust reactive scheduling model.

Much ado about nothing? The surprising persistence of nascent ventures through the global financial crisis

Using the Global Financial Crisis as a natural experiment, we investigate how a major macro-economic crisis affects nascent (i.e., pre-operational) ventures. We hypothesize adverse effects on behaviors, behavioral plans, and expectations for the future, and that these effects would be more pronounced in ventures that are more innovative and/or more relying on loan funding. Overall, we find very limited support for our hypotheses. Our conclusion is that the main reason for the surprising absence of detrimental effects is that a large majority of nascent ventures are mostly affected by a relatively narrow, immediate task environment rather than directly by the fluctuations of the macro-economy.

External orientation and business model adaptation in young and nascent firms : preliminary analysis from the CAUSSE project

Discovering factors that help or impede business model change is an important quest, both for researchers and practitioners. In this study we present preliminary findings based on the CAUSEE survey of young and nascent firms in Australia. In particular, we seek to determine an association between business model adaptation and external orientation among young and nascent firms within the random sample and amongst an oversample of high potential firms. The concept of external orientation is made operational by asking respondents whether, and to what extent, they rely on certain sources of advice and information. We find that high potential firms are more likely to have made at least some change to their business model, that greater use of external sources of advice is generally significantly associated with business model adaptation, but also that there appear to be different patterns of behaviour between the random sample and the over sample.

A sequence analytic model of entrepreneurial discovery and exploitation process

This study examined the effect that temporal order within the entrepreneurial discovery exploitation process has on the outcomes of venture creation. Consistent with sequential theories of discovery-exploitation, the general flow of venture creation was found to be directed from discovery toward exploitation in a random sample of nascent ventures. However, venture creation attempts which specifically follow this sequence derive poor outcomes. Moreover, simultaneous discovery-exploitation was the most prevalent temporal order observed, and venture attempts that proceed in this manner more likely become operational. These findings suggest that venture creation is a multi-scale phenomenon that is at once directional in time, and simultaneously driven by symbiotically coupled discovery and exploitation.

Exploring ways to better manage substance abuse issues

- Historically by default we have created an operational environment where the key AOD issue has been testing and not safety, behaviour and culture. - The tail wagging the dog. - We risk loosing the point the point. - Many people traditionally want to hear a paper about, testing, technology or the pros and cons of saliva VS urine testing etc . - This is a good example of how the workplace alcohol and other drugs area has been politicised, commercialised, simplified and myopic.

Transit line passenger transmission and productiveness under high load conditions

Deterministic transit capacity analysis applies to planning, design and operational management of urban transit systems. The Transit Capacity and Quality of Service Manual (1) and Vuchic (2, 3) enable transit performance to be quantified and assessed using transit capacity and productive capacity. This paper further defines important productive performance measures of an individual transit service and transit line. Transit work (p-km) captures the transit task performed over distance. Passenger transmission (p-km/h) captures the passenger task delivered by service at speed. Transit productiveness (p-km/h) captures transit work performed over time. These measures are useful to operators in understanding their services’ or systems’ capabilities and passenger quality of service. This paper accounts for variability in utilized demand by passengers along a line and high passenger load conditions where passenger pass-up delay occurs. A hypothetical case study of an individual bus service’s operation demonstrates the usefulness of passenger transmission in comparing existing and growth scenarios. A hypothetical case study of a bus line’s operation during a peak hour window demonstrates the theory’s usefulness in examining the contribution of individual services to line productive performance. Scenarios may be assessed using this theory to benchmark or compare lines and segments, conditions, or consider improvements.

Book review : "Carbon Capture and Storage Emerging Legal and Regulatory Issues" edited by Ian Havercroft, Richard Macrory, Richard B Stewart, Oxford, Hart Publishing, 2011

As the international community struggles to find a cost-effective solution to mitigate climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, carbon capture and storage (CCS) has emerged as a project mechanism with the potential to assist in transitioning society towards its low carbon future. Being a politically attractive option, legal regimes to promote and approve CCS have proceeded at an accelerated pace in multiple jurisdictions including the European Union and Australia. This acceleration and emphasis on the swift commercial deployment of CCS projects has left the legal community in the undesirable position of having to advise on the strengths and weaknesses of the key features of these regimes once they have been passed and become operational. This is an area where environmental law principles are tested to their very limit. On the one hand, implementation of this new technology should proceed in a precautionary manner to avoid adverse impacts on the atmosphere, local community and broader environment. On the other hand, excessive regulatory restrictions will stifle innovation and act as a barrier to the swift deployment of CCS projects around the world. Finding the balance between precaution and innovation is no easy feat. This is an area where lawyers, academics, regulators and industry representatives can benefit from the sharing of collective experiences, both positive and negative, across the jurisdictions. This exemplary book appears to have been collated with this philosophy in mind and provides an insightful addition to the global dialogue on establishing effective national and international regimes for the implementation of CCS projects...

A modified dual-band microstrip monopole antenna

A modified microstrip-fed planar monopole antenna with open circuited coupled line is presented in this paper. The operational bandwidth of the proposed antenna covers the 2.4 GHz ISM band (2.42-2.48 GHz) and the 5 GHz WLAN band (5 GHz to 6 GHz). The radiating elements occupy a small area of 23×8 mm2. The Finite Difference Time Domain method is used to predict the input impedance of the antenna. The calculated return loss shows very good agreement with measured data. Reasonable antenna gain is observed across the operating band. The measured radiation patterns are similar to those of a simple monopole antenna.

Diversified service provisioning in global business networks

Companies and their services are being increasingly exposed to global business networks and Internet-based ondemand services. Much of the focus is on flexible orchestration and consumption of services, beyond ownership and operational boundaries of services. However, ways in which third-parties in the “global village” can seamlessly self-create new offers out of existing services remains open. This paper proposes a framework for service provisioning in global business networks that allows an open-ended set of techniques for extending services through a rich, multi-tooling environment. The Service Provisioning Management Framework, as such, supports different modeling techniques, through supportive tools, allowing different parts of services to be integrated into new contexts. Integration of service user interfaces, business processes, operational interfaces and business object are supported. The integration specifications that arise from service extensions are uniformly reflected through a kernel technique, the Service Integration Technique. Thus, the framework preserves coherence of service provisioning tasks without constraining the modeling techniques needed for extending different aspects of services.

Towards a unified service description language for the internet of services : requirements and first developments

Service-oriented Architectures (SOA) and Web services leverage the technical value of solutions in the areas of distributed systems and cross-enterprise integration. The emergence of Internet marketplaces for business services is driving the need to describe services, not only from a technical level, but also from a business and operational perspective. While, SOA and Web services reside in an IT layer, organizations owing Internet marketplaces are requiring advertising and trading business services which reside in a business layer. As a result, the gap between business and IT needs to be closed. This paper presents USDL (Unified Service Description Language), a specification language to describe services from a business, operational and technical perspective. USDL plays a major role in the Internet of Services to describe tradable services which are advertised in electronic marketplaces. The language has been tested using two service marketplaces as use cases.

A Bayesian‐Markov process for reliability prediction

Accurate reliability prediction for large-scale, long lived engineering is a crucial foundation for effective asset risk management and optimal maintenance decision making. However, a lack of failure data for assets that fail infrequently, and changing operational conditions over long periods of time, make accurate reliability prediction for such assets very challenging. To address this issue, we present a Bayesian-Marko best approach to reliability prediction using prior knowledge and condition monitoring data. In this approach, the Bayesian theory is used to incorporate prior information about failure probabilities and current information about asset health to make statistical inferences, while Markov chains are used to update and predict the health of assets based on condition monitoring data. The prior information can be supplied by domain experts, extracted from previous comparable cases or derived from basic engineering principles. Our approach differs from existing hybrid Bayesian models which are normally used to update the parameter estimation of a given distribution such as the Weibull-Bayesian distribution or the transition probabilities of a Markov chain. Instead, our new approach can be used to update predictions of failure probabilities when failure data are sparse or nonexistent, as is often the case for large-scale long-lived engineering assets.

Introduction

In this volume we compile and comment on a collection of some of the most important works on nascent entrepreneurship that have appeared in the last two decades. We do not go further back than that because up until1992 hardly any systematic research on the pre-operational stage of business creation was undertaken. In that year, the terms 'nascent entrepreneur' and 'nascent venture' appear for the first time in the research literature (Reynolds and Miller, Chapter l, 1992; Reynolds and White, 1992). This signals the emergence of a new research paradigm designed to study• business creation processes empirically at very early stages, before an operational firm has come into existence. The most central feature of this type of research is that it identifies a statistically representative sample of nascent entrepreneurs (NEs)- people engaged in ongoing but not yet operational business start-ups- via screening interviews with a very large random sample of adults. The overarching research questions pursued in this emerging research tradition are the following: 1. What proportion of individuals (in various population subgroups) are trying to start a new business at any given time? 2. What led them to engage in the creation of a new business? 3. What characteristics and behaviors associated with the founder(s), the venture, the environment and the process are associated with persistence, progress and success in trying to start a new business?

Optimal sitting and sizing of distributed generators considering plug-in electric vehicles

Some uncertainties such as the stochastic input/output power of a plug-in electric vehicle due to its stochastic charging and discharging schedule, that of a wind unit and that of a photovoltaic generation source, volatile fuel prices and future uncertain load growth, all together could lead to some risks in determining the optimal siting and sizing of distributed generators (DGs) in distributed systems. Given this background, under the chance constrained programming (CCP) framework, a new method is presented to handle these uncertainties in the optimal sitting and sizing problem of DGs. First, a mathematical model of CCP is developed with the minimization of DGs investment cost, operational cost and maintenance cost as well as the network loss cost as the objective, security limitations as constraints, the sitting and sizing of DGs as optimization variables. Then, a Monte Carolo simulation embedded genetic algorithm approach is developed to solve the developed CCP model. Finally, the IEEE 37-node test feeder is employed to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the developed model and method. This work is supported by an Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) Project on Intelligent Grids Under the Energy Transformed Flagship, and Project from Jiangxi Power Company.

Profiling work motivation of project workers

The purpose of this study is to understand the constructs of work motivation in project-based organizations. We first juxtapose work motivation in traditional and project-based organizations to put forward an operational definition of work motivation for our study. We then present the research methodology where we profile work motivation as perceived by project workers using principal component analysis. We obtain a five factor structure of work motivation. Finally, we discuss these results by putting them within the project management perspective and suggest managerial implications.

Overview of Australian Civil UAS Regulations and Supporting Research

This presentation provides a review of current civil unmanned aircraft system operations and applications, the operational environment and aviation safety regulations in Australia. A summary of current regulatory reform efforts is also provided. The presentation includes new and existing research programs established to address the technical and social issues facing the unmanned aircraft systems industry and aid the regulatory reform process.