Civil Engineering Seminar: Process Flexibility in Sports and Healthcare

Description

Timothy Chan, an associate professor of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto, will give a talk entitled "Process Flexibility in Sports and Healthcare" for the Department of Civil Engineering. Chan is also the Canada Research Chair in Novel Optimization and Analytics in Health and director of the Centre for Healthcare Engineering.

Abstract:

In this talk, we present two novel applications of process flexibility. Process flexibility is a manufacturing concept that describes the ability of a production facility to produce different products in response to variations in supply and demand. Our first application considers the application of process flexibility in baseball. In particular, we investigate the value that flexible baseball players, those who can play multiple defensive positions, bring to their team. We find that top teams can attribute at least one or two wins per season to flexibility alone. Other analyses include the impact of flexibility on individual performance and uncovering the true "MVP" of a team. In the second application, we study the flexibility of linear accelerators that deliver radiation as a treatment for various types of cancer. We develop a novel machine learning-based heuristic to design a sparse flexible treatment network and demonstrate that its performance meets or beats the state-of-the-art.