Kingsman Prize 2011
Published 13 December 2011
The Kingsman Prize for 2011 has been jointly awarded to Management Science PhD graduates Navid Izady and Dong (Devin) Li. The prize was established in memory of the long-standing scholar of Management Science, Professor Brian Kingsman.
Navid Izady arrived in Lancaster in October 2007 having previously obtained BSc and MSc degrees in Industrial Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in Iran. He completed his thesis, including a successful viva, within 3 years, and started work as a Lecturer in Operational Research at University of Southampton in the Autumn of 2010.
His chosen area of research was in the general area of applied probability, in particular focusing on the probabilistic analysis of time-dependent queueing systems. This focus was motivated by the practical importance of these types of queueing systems, in particular in health systems where patient arrivals often have major variations by time of day, day of week and/or week of year, and treatment often involves a network of services with waits in between.
His thesis contains valuable contributions in three areas:
- the potential and limitations of numerical approaches for time-dependent queues;
- approximate analysis of time-dependent queues where customers are lost (e.g. patients redirected to another hospital) if there is no available server;
- combining analytic and simulation methods for setting staffing requirements for time-dependent queueing networks, such as those found in hospital accident and emergency departments.
Navid has excelled not only in his research but in his presentation of his work. All three pieces of work have been well very received at conferences, and papers on the second and third contributions have been rapidly accepted by the European Journal of Operational Research and are about to appear.
Before coming to Lancaster, Dong Li (Devin) worked for nearly three years with the Intel Corporation (Shanghai) on problems concerned with the planning and scheduling of semi-conductor production.
Devin’s outstanding thesis contained analyses of a class of stochastic scheduling models concerned with the allocation of scarce resources (modelled as a single server) to a collection of jobs/patients/customers who will become unavailable for service (because of impatience or death, say) at an uncertain point in the future. The goal is to allocate the server to the waiting jobs/patients/customers to maximise the mean number served. This is a simply stated problem whose solution is very challenging. Conventional dynamic programming (DP) is only available for small problems and special cases. Some heuristics have been proposed in the literature and Dong’s proposals, which rest on the use of a fluid approximation to the stochastic system, comfortably beat them all. He also uses Bayesian statistical methods to analyse situations where the scheduling task is assisted by an initial triage of the jobs/patients/customers which is error prone. The work resulted in two papers in leading journals (Naval Research Logistics, 57, 225-236, 2010; European Journal of Operational Research, 215, 169-180, 2011).
Since completing his thesis Devin has worked with the Avis Budget Group as an OR analyst, applying forecasting and optimisation methods to their revenue management problems. He is now looking to resume his academic career.
