Waterloo CORS Student Chapter Seminar

Your Waterloo CORS Student Chapter brings you a series of presentations by your peers

Seminar followed by discussion.

Ahmed Saif will be discussing his work on Sterilization Network Design.

Abstract: With the continuous increase in health care expenditures, it is important to find ways to cut costs while maintaining high quality services. Centralizing the sterilization services of reusable medical devices can lead to significant cost savings due to better utilization of resources, economies of scale, and risk pooling. We formulate the sterilization network design problem as a mixed-integer concave minimization program that incorporates economies of scale and service level requirements under stochastic demand conditions, with the objective of minimizing long-run capacity, transportation, and inventory holding costs. To solve the problem, the resulting formulation is transformed into a mixed-integer second-order cone programming problem with a piecewise linearized cost function. Based on a realistic case study, the proposed approach was found to reach high quality solutions efficiently. The results reveal that significant cost savings can be achieved by consolidating sterilization services as opposed to decentralization.