UvA/CWI Seminar: Madelon de Kemp (UvA)

Dear all,

Details of our next meeting follow. For information on future and past meetings visit spipmeetings.wixsite.com/speakers .

*Title: *The convex order and appointment sequencing
*Speaker:* Madelon de Kemp (UvA)
*When: *Thursday *18 October*, 12:00-13:00
*Where:* CWI, room M390

*Abstract: *
This talk will consist of two parts. The first part is a short tutorial about the convex order on random variables. Intuitively, this order compares the spread of random variables with the same mean, but in a more detailed way than by just looking at the variance. The second part is about our research in appointment scheduling, and how the convex order plays a role in our results. In appointment scheduling problems, the deterministic arrival times of patients in a single-server queue should be determined. This should be done such that there is both little idle time and little waiting time. Part of this problem is the sequencing problem, in which the order in which different patients arrive
should be determined.
The so-called smallest-variance-first rule, which sequences patients in order of increasing variance of their service durations, is often found to
perform better than other heuristics. Under some simplifying assumptions, we will consider the performance of the smallest-variance-first rule. By comparing an upper bound on the expected waiting times under this rule with a lower bound valid for any sequence, we will able to bound the relative difference in performance between the smallest-variance-first rule and the optimal sequence.

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Brendan, Krzysztof, Mariska
http://spipmeetings.wixsite.com/speakers