Theses and Dissertations

Gozde Agirbas

Issuing Body

Mississippi State University

Advisor

Jin, Mingzhou

Committee Member

Eksioglu, Burak

Committee Member

Eksioglu, Duni Sandra

Date of Degree

8-9-2008

Document Type

Graduate Thesis - Open Access

Major

Industrial Engineering

Degree Name

Master of Science

College

College of Engineering

Department

Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

Abstract

This research studies lateral transshipment of critical medical items that have low demands. Due to the high prices of medical items and their limited shelf lives, the expirations contribute significantly to the current prohibitively high cost of the healthcare system. Lateral transshipment between hospitals in a medical system provides opportunities to reduce the expiration costs. This paper studies the decision rule for lateral transshipment in a two-hospital system and extends the rule for the multiple-hospital cases. The decision rule takes the myopic best action by assuming no transshipments will be performed in the future. Numerical experiments demonstrate significant cost savings and the decision rule has a small gap from the upper bound of the total saving. The savings are more considerable when the difference of demand rates at different locations is large and the life time of the medical item is not too long or too short.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11668/15485

Comments

medical items||slow moving||lateral transshipments

Download

Share

COinS