2016 INFORMS Annual Meeting Program

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INFORMS Nashville – 2016
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4 - Education Engineering [SIC]
Kingsley Anthony Reeves, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL,
Contact:
The craft of engineering has been applied to numerous industries, especially the
manufacturing-oriented industries such as automotive, pharmaceuticals, and
petroleum. In more recent history we have seen the application of engineering
approaches to the service sector; examples include financial services and health-
care. A notable exception (and area of great need) is the application of engineer-
ing to education. While there is currently significant momentum in the growth
of engineering education programs across the nation, this paper calls for the cre-
ation of education engineering as a discipline and explores the opportunities that
exist particularly for industrial engineering.
5 - Operational Performance Of Retail Stores
Andreas Holzapfel, Catholic University of Eichstaett-ingolstadt,
Ingolstadt, Germany, , Heinrich Kuhn2,
Michael Sternbeck
We study which factors drive instore operations efficiency. For this purpose we
develop explanatory models that quantify the impact of operational circum-
stances on working hours required in the stores and financial performance. The
results are valuable input for store and logistics planning as well as for staff
assignment planning.
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207A-MCC
Joint Session APS/MSOM: Service Systems in
Applied Probability II
Sponsored: Applied Probability/MSOM
Sponsored Session
Chair: Jing Dong, Northwestern University, Evanston, Evanston, IL,
United States,
1 - When The Past Does Not Predict The Future:
Delay Announcements With Customer Priorities
Rouba Ibrahim, University College London,
, Mor Armony, Achal Bassamboo
Motivated by the problem of making delay announcements, we study the
accuracy of announcements based on the history of delays in a system with
multiple customer classes and a priority service discipline. We present ways of
exploiting this historical information to design new and improved
announcements.
2 - Managing Overstaying Electric Vehicles In
Park-and-charge Facilities
Ragavendran Gopalakrishnan, Research Scientist,
Xerox Research Centre India, Bangalore, India,
Arpita Biswas,
Partha Dutta
With the increase in adoption of Electric Vehicles (EVs), ensuring proper
utilization of the charging infrastructure is a key emerging challenge. Overstaying
by EVs after charging is complete can be discouraged by imposing penalties, but
the upfront uncertainties in parking and charging durations render higher
penalties riskier, which might turn prospective users away, leading to decreased
utilization (and revenue). We develop a framework that integrates models for
realistic user behavior into queueing dynamics to locate the optimal penalty from
the points of view of utilization and revenue, and discover a surprising alignment
between the “green” objective and the “commercial” objective.
3 - The Superposition-traffic Game
Harsha Honnappa, Purdue, 315 N. Grant St., West Lafayette, IN,
47906, United States, Ashish R. Hota,
Shreyas Sundaram
Motivated by ride-sharing and online-platform systems, we consider a model of a
single-server service system where a finite number of traffic sources compete for
service. The presence of a large, but finite, number of traffic sources is assumed to
have positive network effects, but also causes an increase in congestion. The goal
of the sources is to choose the traffic rate, trading-off these two effects. We
present an analysis of the generalized Nash equilibrium (GNE), and discuss
implications on pricing and mechanism design for such service systems.
4 - Finite-size Effects In Critically Dimensioned
Emergency Departments
Britt Mathijsen, Eindhoven University of Technology, PO Box 513,
MetaForum 4.086, Eindhoven, 5600MB, Netherlands,
, Johan van Leeuwaarden,
Foekje Sloothaak
Motivated by the desire to determine staffing levels in an emergency department,
we study a queueing model in which patients alternate between being in need of
direct care from a nurse and being stable, while the total number of patients
present in the ED is limited. We identify a two-fold scaling policy for which the
system exhibits quality-and-efficiency-driven (QED) type behavior as it grows
large, and approximate its performance through a fixed-point method. Building
upon the asymptotic results, we ultimately propose a dimensioning scheme for
the number of nurses and beds necessary to ensure good quality of care in both
stationary and time-varying environments.
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207B-MCC
Queueing Systems
Sponsored: Applied Probability
Sponsored Session
Chair: Guodong Pang, Penn State University, University Park,
University Park, PA, 16801, United States,
1 - Parameter Uncertainty In Naor’s Model
John Hasenbein, University of Texas-Austin,
, Ying Chen
We examine the classical Naor’s model when the arrival rate is not known with
certainty by either the system controller or the customers. Rather, only the arrival
rate distribution is known. We analyze the system in the observable and
unobservable queue length regimes from the point of view of individuals, a social
optimizer, and a revenue maximizing firm.
2 - Strong Approximations For General Time Varying Queues
Jamol Pender, Cornell University,
We present a novel methodology for approximating the queue length
distributions of non-Markovian and time varying queueing systems. The first step
is to approximate the general distributions with phase type distributions and
second step is to use strong approximations to construct fluid and diffusion limits
for the phase type queueing process. We show that our approximations are quite
accurate in a variety of parameter settings.
3 - Pull-based Load Distribution Among Heterogeneous Parallel
Servers: The Case Of Multiple Routers
Aleksandr Stolyar, Lehigh University,
We consider a heterogeneous service system, consisting of several large server
pools and multiple ‘routers’. Each router receives equal fraction of the customer
arrival flow, and assigns each customer to a server immediately upon arrival. The
asymptotic regime is considered such that the total arrival rate and pool sizes scale
to infinity simultaneously, while the system load remains subcritical. We
introduce a ‘multi-router’ version of the ‘pull-based’ routing scheme and prove
that, under this scheme and certain assumptions, both waiting times and blocking
probabilities asymptotically vanish.
4 - The Method Of Chaining For Many Server Queues
Yuhang Zhou, Penn State University,
Guodong Pang
We discuss how the method of chaining can be applied to prove two-parameter
process limits for many server queues. It provides useful maximal inequalities for
two-parameter processes. The method is universal for models with general i.i.d.
and dependent service times, and with general time-varying service times (e.g.,
arrival dependent services or entering-service-time dependent services).
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207C-MCC
Real Options
Sponsored: Financial Services
Sponsored Session
Chair: Kuno Huisman, Tilburg University, Best, Netherlands,
1 - Predatory Pricing Under Uncertainty: Revisiting The Deep
Pocket Argument
Maria Lavrutich, Tilburg University,
In this paper we develop a stochastic model of predatory pricing. When profits
evolve stochastically, a negative demand shock can lead to bankruptcy for firms,
that cannot immediately raise external capital. This creates incentives for market
incumbents to use predatory pricing strategies in order to keep new players out of
the industry. We show that firms may use a large cash reserve as a war chest to
initiate a price war that could drive the opponent out of the market. Because of
uncertainty the new player may wish to take a chance and enter based on the
probability of success. Therefore, the realized market structure may vary for
different sample paths of the stochastic process.
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