Generic Model Base Design for Decision Support Systems in Revenue Management: Applications to Hotel and Health Care Sectors - Efficient Decision Support Systems: Practice and Challenges from Current to Future - page 190

To enable the handling of problems in which a customer can be assigned to multiple
intervals of time, it becomes necessary to make use of the attribute Preference of the entity
Allocation . The attribute Preference will be used by the allocation algorithm to decide which
slot to assign to a specific customer in case there are different alternatives. The DSS built
upon the model base should ease the definition of a set of rules intended to define the values
of the attribute.
Finally, the DSS should as well assist in the definition of an objective function, which is an
attribute of the Process Instance entity, built upon mathematical combinations of a subset of
parameters and variables.

6. Example of application to the health care sector

Based on the few cases reported of application of Revenue Management techniques to the
Health Sector, and specifically on the pioneering work of Chapman & Carmel (1992) plus
the above mentioned more recent work by Gupta & Denton (2008) and Nordgren (2009), an
application to the dimensioning of hospital emergency wards is presented here.
Specialized doctors are treated as the infrastructures whose assignment is to be optimized
(cardiologists, general surgeons, pediatricians...). Patients (system customers) are segmented
according to their age (children vs. adults) and their symptoms. Channel Types to access the
emergency ward are defined as being admitted though reception or through ambulance,
distinguishing two levels of severity.

Customer Segment Type Channel Type Infrastructure Type Value Type Generic Time

ID_CustomerSegType ID_ChannelType ID_InfrastructureType ID_ValueType ID_GenericTime

Adult: general discomfort Ambulance: slight Family Doctor High T1

Adult: cardiac arrest Ambulance: severe Cardiologist Medium T2

Adult: digestive problems Reception: slight Gastroenterologist Low T3

Adult: injuries Reception: severe Traumatologist

Child: sick Surgeon

Pediatrician

Table 2. Health Care example direct instances

The combined consideration of these three criteria leads to the evaluation of infrastructure
access types as high, medium or low value from the point of view of the system's
effectiveness. The Generic Times are used to define emergency shifts, since it might make
sense not to have certain specialists in some shifts. In the example, three generic times
represent two different shifts. Table 2 shows the example values for the model definition.
The process model is defined as the set of possible combinations of the direct instances of
the process metamodel entities. Table 3 represents the business process example. Once the
process model has been defined, several optimization problems can be stated in the business
process instance level. In this example, we describe an infrastructure dimensioning problem,
in which the number of medical specialists of each type is to be determined. Thus, in the
process instance model of Figure 3, all the attributes of the instance entities but the Quantity
attribute of the Infrastructure Set, will receive a value. The Quantity attribute will thus be
the variable to be optimized. Attributes that do not have to be considered in the
optimization problem—in this example O verbooking does not make sense— will receive a
default value to avoid confusion with the variables of the problem.