Graduate Courses

Part A: Performance optimization of stochastic service systems using data. Study of call centres and emergency departments; data-based analysis of service systems; applications in finite-horizon, periodic and steady-state settings. Empirical analysis using charts. The importance of measurements, their analysis and control, and their link to business objectives. Data-acquisition methods, automated and face-to-face systems, and transaction-based measurements in banking, telephone, internet, transportation and administrative services. Summary statistics and tools, including time variations, Pareto charts, histograms, fishbone diagrams and scatterplots. DSPERT/CPM, BPR networks, and their structural elements: customers or jobs, activities, resources, processes and paths. Activity, resource and combined diagrams, project management in a dynamic-stochastic framework, use of queues through DSPERT/CPM, determining service-station capacity, flow models for service networks and deterministic models of a service station. Applications in staffing. Poisson processes, scaling and centering of data, dynamic random motion, time-dependent Poisson processes for internet traffic, offered-load calculation, phase-type distributions and forecasting. Study of basic systems and networks, call centres, the M/M/n+G system, designing call centres with impatient customers, Erlang-B/C analysis and asymptotic behaviour, time-varying input loads, workforce management, Erlang-B/C/A in the QED regime, time-dependent queueing analysis, time-varying queues and skills-based routing, server scheduling, customer routing and staffing, E-driven and QED skills-based routing strategies, and call-centre dimensioning. Part B: Reliability of engineering systems. Failure-data analysis, inspection and maintenance analysis, system reliability, general reliability-calculation methods, reliability of monotone systems, reliability of standard systems and networks, reliability bounds, component-importance measures, system availability and maintenance, system signatures, study of reliability characteristics through signatures, and data-driven techniques for reliability estimation.