Thesis Defense - Seyyed Kian Farajkhah (MSIE)

Seyyed Kian Farajkhah - M.Sc. Industrial Engineering

Asst. Prof. Enis Kayış - Advisor

Asst. Prof. Elvin Çoban - Co-advisor

STOCHASTIC SCHEDULING OF OPERATING ROOMS
AND REUSABLE MEDICAL DEVICES: A SIMULATION
OPTIMIZATION APPROACH STOCHASTIC
SCHEDULING OF ORS AND RMDS

Date: 08.08.2019

Time: 14:00

Location: AB1 232

Thesis Committee: 

Asst. Prof. Enis Kayış,  Özyeğin University

Asst. Prof. Elvin Çoban,  Özyeğin University

Asst. Prof. Erinç Albey,  Özyeğin University

Asst. Prof. Mehmet Önal, Özyeğin University

Asst. Prof. Semih Yalçındağ,  Yeditepe University

Abstract

Health care expenditures are expected to grow every year, and more than 40 % of a hospital's total expenses and revenues are generated by surgical operations. One of the major resources required during surgeries are reusable medical devices (RMDs). RMDs are surgical instruments utilized during surgeries which have to be reprocessed by thorough cleaning followed by high-level disinfection or sterilization after each use. RMDs have to be planned with operating rooms (ORs) concurrently since insufficient RMDs may cause delays in operation starting times. However, the management of RMD sterilization stage is nontrivial. First, RMDs are sent to sterilization service at different times due to different finishing times of operations during a day. Second, the decision of how to load the sterilization machines, i.e., how to batch RMDs, is a complicated one. Lastly, time spent during sterilization has to be considered during scheduling of ORs since an operation cannot start without the required number of RMDs. In this paper, we study the integrated scheduling of ORs and sterilization of RMDs under stochastic surgery durations. We propose a simulation-optimization approach to tackle this problem, and through numerical studies show that our approach could lead to significant (15% on average) cost savings for a hospital.

Bio

Seyyed Kian Farajkhah received his bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering from Islamic Azad University, Ardabil, Iran in 2013. In 2015, he joined the research team of Prof. Celik in Middle East Technical University and worked in the field of humanitarian logistics for 3 years. In winter of 2018, he joined the Master of Science Program in Industrial Engineering at Ozyegin University and has been working under the supervision of Prof. Kayış and Prof. Çoban. He has worked as a teacher assistant and assists Prof. Kayis in course of Probability and Random Variables. His research interest mainly focused on scheduling of operating room and simulation.