Randolph Hall

University of Southern California | USC · Epstein Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering

This edited volume captures and communicates the best thinking on how to improve healthcare by improving the delivery of services -- providing care when and where it is needed most -- through application of state-of-the-art scheduling systems. Over 12 chapters, the authors cover aspects of setting appointments, allocating healthcare resources, and...

This book is dedicated to improving healthcare through reducing the delays experienced by patients. One aspect of this goal is to improve the flow of patients, so that they do not experience unnecessary waits as they flow through a healthcare system. Another aspect is ensuring that services are closely synchronized with patterns of patient demand...

An exploration of concepts and techniques necessary for diagnosing and correcting the problems that create queues.

This paper introduces the problem of finding the least expected travel time path between two nodes in a network with travel times that are both random and time-dependent. It first shows that standard shortest path algorithms do not find the minimum expected travel time path on such a network, then proposes a method which does find the minimum path....

Over the past thirty-five years, a tremendous body of both theoretical and empirical research has been established on the `science of transportation'. The Handbook of Transportation Science has collected and synthesized this research into a systematic treatment of this field covering its fundamental concepts, methods, and principles. The purpose of...

Data Analytics on the progression of COVID-19 in the United States, examining metrics and models for disease transmission and vaccination.

Presentation of research on how universities reward non traditional knowledge products and industry engagement.

We analyze the progression of COVID-19 in the United States over a nearly one-year period beginning March 1, 2020 with a novel metric motivated by queueing models, tracking partial-average day-of-event and cumulative probability distributions for events, where events are points in time when new cases and new deaths are reported. The partial average...

Global survey of academic promotion and intellectual property policies, and how they promote innovation among faculty.

Open Innovation practices in universities

As the Department of Homeland Security’s first University Center of Excellence, CREATE serves our nation through advanced models and tools for the evaluation of the risks, costs and consequences of threats to human livelihood and through assessment of strategies to mitigate risks and respond to emergencies. This presentation describes the work of C...

There are many reasons to pursue open scholarship. Research is more transparent and trusted because others can validate its quality, accuracy, and reproducibility. Collaboration is expedited by making data, methods, and tools available early in the discovery process. Open scholarship also promotes efficiency by rapidly informing others of promising...

Industry Engaged Universities: how universities are creating holistic strategies for industry relations, spanning all missions.

Students are an essential part of university innovation. Through their training, research and energy, students acquire and transfer knowledge to industry, and they help establish new businesses and start-up companies. This paper investigates how universities might capture the entrepreneurial energies of students toward the goal of university improv...

In this paper, we analyze the progression of COVID-19 in the United States over a nearly one-year period beginning March 1, 2020, with a novel metric representing the partial-average day-of-event, where events are new cases and new deaths. The metric is calculated as a function of date and location to illustrate patterns of disease, showing growing...

Integrated modeling of disease transmission and patient flow: methods for reducing the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Innovation in universities serves many purposes: helping society through technology transfer, building economies, supporting the aspirations of faculty and students to be entrepreneurs or make an impact, and generating revenue. Such outside-focused innovation is complemented by inside innovation, which aims to improve the practices of the universit...

Purpose Students are an essential part of university innovation. Through their training, research and energy, students acquire and transfer knowledge to industry, and they help establish new businesses and start-up companies. This paper investigates how universities might capture the entrepreneurial energies of students toward the goal of universit...

This session will report on strategies used by UIDP university members to engage industry in research, economic development, education, and healthcare. A framework will be presented for comprehensive engagement across of spectrum of activities that offer mutual benefit, addressing the attitudes, services, and structure for successful outcomes. Pane...

How do universities express priorities for innovation and entrepreneurship through their strategic plans and mission statements? Presenter Randy Hall and his research team have analyzed the text of strategic plans at highly ranked universities to assess strategy for "inside innovation" (improvement in the institution for practices and offerings) an...

We analyze innovation in university strategic plans to assess whether innovation is a stated priority, to what end innovation is sought, and whether innovation is a comprehensive strategy or more carefully bounded, excluding innovation opportunities. Our analysis utilized Atlas.ti software to quantify word usage and to extract and classify sentence...

Colleges and universities are better at moving ideas and inventions outside of the institution than they are at achieving change within. One way to accomplish the latter is to innovate research practices by aligning information technology with open science.

Universities are among the oldest institutions in the world. In America, most of the high-est-ranked universities were founded in the 19th century or earlier. Despite their age, universities need to innovate, perhaps now more than ever, to serve evolving societal needs, modernize through use of technology, stay financially viable, and fulfill their...

Innovation in universities serves many purposes: helping society through technology transfer, building economies, supporting the aspirations of faculty and students to be an entrepreneur or make an impact, and generating revenues. Such outside focused innovation is complemented by inside innovation, aiming toward improving the practices of the univ...

Entrepreneurial cultures do not happen by accident in universities, yet they are notoriously difficult to manage or plan. Drawing from the speaker’s 14½ years as VP of Research at USC and his studies on innovation, this talk will describe how universities are promoting entrepreneurship in research, education, and service.

Universities are among the oldest institutions in the world. In America, most of the highest ranked universities were founded in the 19 th century or earlier. Despite their age, universities need to innovate, perhaps now more than ever, to serve evolving societal needs, modernize through use of technology, stay financially viable and fulfill their...

In this paper, we propose an enhanced SEIRD (Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Recovered-Death) model with time varying case fatality and transmission rates for confirmed cases and deaths from COVID-19. We show that when case fatalities and transmission rates are represented by simple Sigmoid functions, historical cases and fatalities can be fit with...

Open scholarship shares methods, resources and results, advancing novel research and offering transparency for research rigor and reproducibility. This presentation discusses how to create a culture of innovation to modernize university practices, advancing higher education prominence as a source of truth and knowledge.

Diagram shows interventions, and outcomes, to consider in the progression of the COVID-19 disease, aimed at aligning healthcare capacity with public health measures aimed at reducing the transmission of the disease.

Strategic Alignment of Open Scholarship with University Values

Research operations and finances at the University of Southern California

Presentation at annual meeting

Ming Hsieh Institute Introductiono

How information is valued in navigation and route finding, and the resulting strategies for life.

Forging Effective Academic Industry Relationships

Presentation on changing technology, rigor and transparency in scientific publication.

Presentation to University Industry Demonstration Partnership

During the recent downturn in federal funding, universities have increasingly pursued industry as a source of research support. Yet industry sources still only account for 6% of total university research expenditures. What does it take to create a productive sponsored research relationship with industry, and what are the benefits in doing so? This...

Presentation at ”Big Data and Human Behavior Symposium”

Information technology (IT) holds the promise to transform academic health centers (AHCs) by making health care more effective at meeting the needs of individual patients, but doing so demands careful planning to surmount the challenges of deploying complex systems. This chapter provides a system engineering approach for anticipating and reducing t...

Presentation to Elsevier Technology Conference, October 6, 2015

Presentation to Keck/Dornsife Retreat October 1, 2015

Presentation to the Association of Academic Health Centers, Atlanta, September, 2015

Survey of commercial software for routing and scheduling vehicles, including recent innovations in how software is improving fleet management.

Brings field of patient flow operations completely up to date New chapters on Hospital-wide System Patient Flow, Emergency Department Crowding, and six other topics Editor is one of the most prominent and well-published names in the field This book is dedicated to improving healthcare through reducing delays experienced by patients. With an int...

How analytics and operations research driven tools help healthcare organizations manage resources more efficiently, delivering healthcare when and where it is needed. http://www.informs.org/ORMS-Today/Private-Articles/June-Volume-39-Number-3/Scheduling-for-better-healthcare

http://chronicle.com/article/Scholarship-Liberated-From/131371/

Healthcare scheduling entails matching health care resources (providers, rooms, equipment, supplies, organs, devices and instruments) to patient needs, when and where they need them. Effective scheduling reduces waste, reduces patient waiting and improves health outcomes. Scheduling methods rely on operations research techniques, including forecast...

Beds are a critical resource for serving patients in hospitals, but also provide a place where patients queue for needed care. Bed requirements result from medical needs along with the hospital’s effectiveness at reducing average length of stay and hospitalization rates. Hospitals can reduce the need for beds by reducing the unproductive portion of...

This paper presents a robust optimization model for n-person finite state/action discounted stochastic games with incomplete information. We consider n-player, non-zero sum discounted stochastic games in which none of the players knows the true data of the game and each player considers a distribution-free incomplete information stochastic game to...

Less-than-TruckLoad (LTL) carriers transport small to medium sized shipments through networks of terminals. One of the issues in designing an LTL network is to determine how drivers should be distributed among locations, with the goal of reducing total variability through risk pooling. By concentrating drivers at a limited number of terminals, the...

A critical link in the overnight Express Package services is the on-time arrival of trucks at local airport terminals. Truck delays can delay the package sorting process, which can in turn delay aircraft departures from the local terminal, as well as aircraft departures from hub terminals that depend on timely aircraft arrivals. In this paper, the...

Crash rates for trucks depend in part on the length of time drivers have been operating their vehicles. This paper investigates bounds on the reduction in crash rates due to the imposition of hours-of-service regulations, which limit the number of hours drivers operate their vehicles. Methods for analyzing probability distributions for trip length,...

This paper investigates the construction of routes for local delivery of packages. The primary objective of this research is to provide realistic models to optimize vehicle dispatching when customer locations and demands vary from day to day, while maintaining driver familiarity with their service territories, hence dispatch consistency. The object...

A realistic and efficient tactical model is developed that is able to optimize equipment and crew movements in long-haul trucking networks so that drivers are able to return home within a reasonable amount of time. A unique feature of the model is that driver, tractor, and trailer routes are simultaneously optimized. An underlying assumption is tha...

The system of health care can be evaluated from four perspectives: macro, regional, center, and department. In each case, reduction of patient delay depends on improving interfaces as patients are transferred from activity to activity or department to department. This chapter presents basic tools for resolving delays at interfaces, through mapping...

We develop bounds on the maximum longitudinal velocity to evaluate the performance and help the design of Mobility Allowance Shuttle Transit (MAST) services. MAST is a new concept in transportation that merges the flexibility of Demand Responsive Transit (DRT) systems with the low cost operability of fixed-route bus systems. A MAST system allows bu...

The Transportation Science and Logistics (TSL) Society Dissertation Prize Competition is the oldest and most prestigious competition for doctoral dissertations in the field. The 2005 TSL dissertation prize committee consisted of Professor Donald Hearn (University of Florida), Professor Ben Heydecker (University College, London), Professor Mark Hick...

In this paper we investigate the effect of the Los Angeles transit strike on highway congestion through analysis of highway sensor data, using both a before-and-after comparison, and a control group comparison. We found that average 5:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. traffic speeds declined by as much as 20% during the strike, and the average length of the ru...

Patient Flow: Reducing Delay in Healthcare Delivery is dedicated to improving healthcare through reducing the delays experienced by patients. One aspect of this goal is to improve the flow of patients, so that they do not experience unnecessary waits as they flow through a healthcare system. Another aspect is ensuring that services are closely sync...

Automated highway systems (AHS) are intended to increase the throughput and safety of roadways through computer control, communication and sensing. In the “platoon” concept for AHS, vehicles travel on highways in closely spaced groups. To maximize benefits, it is desirable to form platoons that are reasonably large (five or more vehicles), and it i...

This paper extends traditional production/distribution system analysis to address raw material, factories, and markets located beyond Earth. It explains the eventual advantages of such operations and discusses likely sites in the solar system. It furnishes a typology for production/distribution systems, assessing the fit of each type to space opera...

This paper examines a real-time dispatch strategy for picking up small package shipments. Customers make requests for pickups while vehicles are in the field, retrieving shipments from other customers. All requests for pickup must be made prior to a daily cutoff time, and all requests made prior to the cutoff time must be served by the end of the d...

This report reviews methodologies and applications in the literature pertaining to decision making problems in the presence of adversaries. This investigation is essentially motivated by the need to determine optimal strategies against an adversarial and adaptive opponent. Such a problem arises in the context of terrorism threats. Probabilistic ris...

The goal of this project has been to model patient flows in Los Angeles County/ University of Southern California (LAC/USC) hospital and its outpatient facility as an integrated system, and to apply methods of industrial engineering to identify system bottlenecks and recommendations for improvement. This goal has been accomplished through a series...

In this paper, we develop an analytical model that aids decision-makers in designing a hybrid grid network that integrates a flexible demand responsive service with a fixed route service. The objective of the model is to determine the optimal number of zones in an area where each zone is served by a number of on-demand vehicles. The function of the...

The objective of this report is to optimize performance of AutomatedHighway Systems through management of space accounting for interaction between entrance and exit processes. To accomplish this objective, we develop acomprehensive framework, including a new integrated highway model called the moving slot model, and operational strategies, called s...

This research develops a realistic and efficient operational model to optimize empty equipment and crew movements in long-haul trucking networks with consolidation, where returning drivers home within a reasonable amount of time is an important issue. The problem can be stated as follows. On a network of consolidation centers, demand is expressed a...

Recently, bus transit operators have begun to adopt technologies that enable bus locations to be tracked from a central location in real-time. Combined with other technologies, such as automated passenger counting and wireless communication, it is now feasible for these operators to execute a variety of real-time strategies for coordinating the mov...

The economics of roadways, and their variability in demand, favor construction of multi-layered and inter-connected networks. Different network layers are designed to different standards and to perform somewhat different functions, though all provide the common function of mobility for a reasonably homogeneous class of vehicles. Yet interfaces have...

In the less-than-truckload industry, it is commonplace to designate specific routes for tractors and drivers that remain in effect over extended time periods, lasting weeks or months. On a day-to-day basis, however, the number of tractors traveling on a route can vary in relation to demand. In this paper, we study routes that consist of two or more...

This paper investigates decentralized control methods for managing equipment inventories in the longhaul portion of less-than-truckload (LTL) networks. Performance is measured with respect to: (1) cost of moving empty equipment, (2) cost of owning equipment, and (3) backorders due to stocking out of empty equipment. Our basic approach has two steps...

This paper models response times and delays for highway incidents, accounting for spacing between interchanges and the time penalty for changing directions, enabling a response vehicle to reach an incident on the opposite side of the highway. A fundamental question in dispatching incident crews is whether to send the closest vehicle that is current...

The economics of roadways, and their variability in demand, favor construction of multi-layered and inter-connected networks. Different network layers are designed to different standards and to perform somewhat different functions, though all provide the common function of mobility for a reasonably homogeneous class of vehicles. This paper investig...

A critical link in the overnight package business is the on-time arrival of trucks at airport terminals. Truck delays can delay the package sorting and transfer process, which can in turn delay aircraft departures from the local terminal, as well as aircraft departures from hub terminals that depend on timely aircraft arrivals. This paper models th...

Most bus transit systems only offer direct service between a small fraction of the origin/destination pairs that they serve. As a consequence, many travelers must transfer between bus lines to complete their journey. In this paper schedule control policies are created to minimize transfer time under stochastic conditions. We determine how long a bu...

This paper evaluates the entrance capacity and queueing delay for Automated Highway Systems through use of simulations and analytical modeling. Queueing statistics are also used to determine the sustainable capacity of alternative concepts, taking trip length distribution and spacing between ramps into consideration. Based on safety-spacing headway...

Bus riders utilize a variety of information media to learn how to travel to their destinations and to learn when they should arrive at bus stops. As part of the OCTA (Orange County Transit Authority) Transit Probe evaluation, 1199 passengers were surveyed to measure relationships between information acquisition and waiting time. A unique aspect of...

Automated highway systems are envisioned to provide capacity improvements over conventional highways by controlling vehicle trajectories and regulating entrance, egress and lane-changing. This paper examines the entrance process with mixed vehicle classes and prioritization on an AHS with plalooning, Queueing statistics are estimated for different...

The focus of this project is to study alternative system architectures and ITS technologies that can improve the efficiency of personalized public transit and demand responsive systems such as paratransit. This interim report reviews available and emerging ITS technologies that have been deployed or are being considered for this industry. We also c...

This is the final report for the project Incident Management:Process Analysis and Improvement.The report summarizes findings from three earlier working papers (1998-31,2000-14 and 2000-15)completed under this project, and provides additional analysis on specific scenarios. This study highlights the importance of the following principles: 1)Response...

In 1993, the Federal Highway Administration embarked on a program to develop a national system architecture (NSA) for intelligent-vehicle-highway-systems (IVHS, later renamed intelligent-transportation-systems). The project was completed in early 1996, with the delivery of documents totalling more than 10,000 pages. This paper examines the effects...

This paper develops models to evaluate the operational efficiency of alternative designs for railcar maintenance facilities. The focus is on utilization of maintenance positions in shops where multiple cars are assigned to the same track, creating the possibility of blocking. The paper develops and evaluates two rules for assigning jobs to shop sta...

The congestion probe feature of the Orange County Transportation Authority (California) bus probe project was evaluated by comparing automobile and bus trajectories and examining alternative congestion detection methods. The focus was city streets on which delays occur at signalized intersections and bus delays at bus stops. The analysis revealed t...

This report provides interim results on the design of interfaces between automated highways and conventional street systems. The purpose here is to identify the strategic issues in interface design, and to provide preliminary analysis on just one of these issues (separation between highway entrance and exits). Future research will explore a full se...

INCISIM is a computer program that simulates the occurrence of highway incidents, the dispatching of emergency vehicles, and the traffic flow on the network. INCISIM can represent multiple types of emergency vehicles, include highway patrol cars, freeway service patrol trucks, tow trucks operating from fixed bases, highway maintenance vehicles, and...