Ali A. Houshmand

Healthcare simulation: a case study at a local clinic

Today, researchers and analysts are beginning to uncover the potential for using simulation in the health care field; with a multitude of interactions between patients, physicians, nurses, and technical and support staff, simulation can be an invaluable tool. Inefficiencies can be eliminated or resource allocation changed to determine an optimal setup. Primarily, simulation has been used in the health care field in comparison studies of alternative systems for resource or scheduling requirements. When analyzing such alternatives, the standard performance measures are typically reported: throughput, time in system, and queue times and lengths. This paper is a systems analysis of a clinic using the above mentioned performance measures along with another proposed performance measure, total cash flow.

SIMULTANEOUS REPRESENTATION OF MULTIVARIATE AND CORRESPONDING UNIVARIATE X¯ CHARTS USING LINE-GRAPH

In this article we present a new method of monitoring pictorially a multivariate process through a simultaneous graphic representation of the Hotelling T2 charts and the corresponding individual univariate elements. The effectiveness of this method, hen..

Modeling a controlled conveyor network with merging configuration

Simulation with Arena is used to analyze a controlled conveyor network with merging configuration (CNMC). We use simulation to realize the logic in a queueing-theoretic model (QTM), and to analyze the behavior of CNMCs under various conditions. We also examine the performance of QTM while keeping or violating the QTM assumptions and constraints. Simulation experiments are designed for the special features of CNMC operations. Various situations are investigated to identify the behavior of CNMCs as well as the robustness of QTM. A case study is reported where mainline and induction-line speeds change proportionally.

MULTIVARIATE RIDGE RESIDUAL CHARTS

We present a new charting technique called the Multivariate Ridge Residual Charts (MRRC), which can be used to control the mean vector in a multivariate environment. We assume that the process output follows a multivariate Normal distribution and that t..

Benchmarking Total Quality Management: Programs in Engineering Colleges

Benchmarking as a tool to achieve improvement in operations and customer satisfaction, is a widely adopted practice in industry. Benchmarking should be an integral part of total quality management (TQM) programs in academia as it is an effective method ..

Misclassification probabilities for quadratic discriminant function

An approximate method of computing the misclassification probabilities for quadratic discriminant functions (QDF) with known covariance matrices is suggested in this paper. Large scale simulation from empirical distribution of experimental data is used to test the effectivenessof the approximation and compare its performance against an existing method. It is shown that thisapproximation method performs well for multivariate normal distributions of dimension 2, 3. 4, 5,7, and 10. Exact expressions for computing these probabilities for univariate quadratic discriminant function are provided.

Tuning the linear membership functions in spreadsheets to improve the quality of multi-factor Fuzzy interference

This paper introduces and illustrates a method of using general-purpose spreadsheets to do fuzzy inference with multi-criteria, when a fuzzy problem has linear membership functions. Three fuzzy sets (labels) represented by eight pairs of parameters are used to partition the domain of a variable. Once these are defined, a spreadsheet can automatically perform the fuzzy inference on any input. A macro is written in MS-Excel for the convenience of implementation. With the help of spreadsheets, two kinds of tune-up are investigated to improve the quality of fuzzy inference. The first is to use membership functions with pair-wise overlap, as opposed to one that uses full overlap (represented here by membership function with three-label overlap). The second is to reshape the membership functions through tuning the medium labels. The results proved that they both help to make the inference more effective and efficient.

CONTINUOUS QUALITY IMPROVEMENT TOOLS AT WORK: CASE STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

Quality management programs implemented for continuous quality improvement at the University of Cincinnati are described. One of the earliest programs was implemented in 1993 to improve teaching effectiveness in the College of Engineering. It was base..

A Decision Support Framework for Product Development

To be successful in a competitive environment and ever-changing marketplace, companies need to reduce product development times. Introducing new products in a short time requires a total product development approach. This means designers must simultaneo..