Jim Dai, Ph.D. Cornell University

Abstract: Hospital inpatient beds are usually grouped into several wards, with each dedicated to a "primary" medical specialty. When a patient waits too long to get a primary bed, a hospital manager may assign her to a non-primary bed, which is often undesirable. Deciding when to use such "overflow" practice in real time decision making can be challenging. We develop an approximate dynamic programming (ADP) algorithm to aid the decision making. A key step is to choose appropriate basis functions. We use a novel combination of fluid control and single-pool approximation to devise such functions. We demonstrate, via extensive numerical experiments in realistic hospital settings, that our ADP algorithm is effective in finding good overflow policies. This is a joint work Pengyi Shi at Purdue University.

Biography: Jim Dai is the Leon C. Welch Professor of Engineering in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering (ORIE) at Cornell University. Prior joining Cornell in 2012, he held the Chandler Family Chair of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was a faculty member from 1990 to 2012. Dai studies applied probability models for efficient resource allocations in processing networks that model service systems such as customer contact centers, data centers, hospital patient flow management, airline yield management, and ridesharing networks. Dai received his BA and MA from Nanjing University and his PhD from Stanford. He is an elected fellow of Institute of Mathematical Statistics and an elected fellow of Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). He has been the editor-in-chief of Mathematics of Operations Research since 2013.