Title: Studying the impact f weather changes on wine quality
Proponent:
José Luís Borges (DEIG) (jlborges@fe.up.pt) e
José António Sarsfield Cabral (jacabral@fe.up.pt)
We have an ongoing project aiming at analysing the impact of climate changes on wine production quality. We
have a partner that collected several years of detailed wine tasting panel data which can be used to construct a
measure of the annual production quality. In addition, we have access to data on the weather conditions that was
collected from climate stations owned by wine producers. The proposed research problem is to make use of
advanced data mining and data analysis techniques to study the impact of climate changes on wine production
quality. Most available studies are focused on the impact of a single variable, such as the temperature, on variables
such as the number of vintages. We have at our disposal a datasets rich in detail on both the weather conditions
and on the wine production quality which we expect will provide a deep understanding of the impact of weather
changes in the wine quality. The outcome of this research project can have a strong impact on the wine production
regulations.
Title: Operating room capacity planning and scheduling optimization
Proponents:
José Luís Borges (DEIG) (jlborges@fe.up.pt) e
Bernardo Almada-Lobo (DEIG) (almada-lobo@fe.up.pt)
Despite the efforts to adequately lower waiting times through the Program Integrated System to Manage the
Surgical Waiting Lists (SIGIC), launched in 2004, at the end of April 2008, the number of people waiting for a
surgery in Portugal was 192.750, 9% of whom had been waiting for over twelve months. The median waiting times
corresponded to 4.4 months. The scenario is even worse if we acknowledge that, if a public hospital exceeds 75%
of the maximum allowable time to guarantee the surgery, a voucher is offered to the patient for use in a private
unit. In case of refusal, the patient is guaranteed to be operated in the chosen Hospital, but the waiting time is
reset to zero. Furthermore, the aging population and the constant increase in health care costs are demanding
improved rationalization of available resources. In a typical hospital the operating room (OR) is a bottleneck and
consumes an important percentage of the annual budget. Thus, the problem of Operating Room capacity planning
and scheduling is of topical importance in our society. It is imperative that hospitals reduce costs and improve their
financial assets, on the one hand, and maximize the level of patient satisfaction, on the other hand.
We have a project with the goal of building a framework to tackle the problem of Operating Room optimization
with a combination of advanced data mining, optimization and simulation techniques. We have also contacts with
a Portuguese hospital that will serve as a case study. The problem of OR capacity planning and scheduling is
focused on optimizing resource allocation in an efficient way and on scheduling the surgeries in a way that
optimizes quality of service to the patients and the performance and satisfaction of hospital staff (doctors, nurses
and auxiliary staff). Due to a set of competing objectives, the large number of decision variables and the stochastic
nature of the problem (e.g. the estimation of surgery duration), it can be defined as a complex multi-objective and
stochastic problem. Although it is an active research field most approaches focus enhancing specific optimization
methods for focused sub-problems, on using a simulation model to help improving decision making or on data
mining methods for predicting surgery duration times.
Our approach to the problem is inspired in a framework that suggests the integration of a data mining and an
optimization model into a simulation framework in order to help guide the analyst to the optimal system
configuration. We aim to adapt that framework to the problem of OR capacity planning and scheduling and to
enhance it with the integration of data mining and optimization techniques into the simulation process in a way
that enables a more accurate representation of the problem stochastic nature. The project is focused on a problem
that has a strong impact in our society and that presents difficult research challenges which can be pursuit in a PhD
research.