arXiv subjects

Karen Smilowitz

Publications and source records attributed to Karen Smilowitz.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Analyzing Country-Level Vaccination Rates and Determinants of Practical Capacity to Administer COVID-19 Vaccines

The COVID-19 vaccine development, manufacturing, transportation, and administration proved an extreme logistics operation of global magnitude. Global vaccination levels, however, remain a key concern in preventing the emergence of new strains and minimizing the impact of the pandemic's disruption of daily life. In this paper, country-level vaccination rates are analyzed through a queuing framework to extract service rates that represent the practical capacity of a country to administer vaccines. These rates are further characterized through regression and interpretable machine learning methods with country-level demographic, governmental, and socio-economic variates. Model results show that participation in multi-governmental collaborations such as COVAX may improve the ability to vaccinate. Similarly, improved transportation and accessibility variates such as roads per area for low-income countries and rail lines per area for high-income countries can improve rates. It was also found that for low-income countries specifically, improvements in basic and health infrastructure (as measured through spending on healthcare, number of doctors and hospital beds per 100k, population percent with access to electricity, life expectancy, and vehicles per 1000 people) resulted in higher vaccination rates. Of the high-income countries, those with larger 65-plus populations struggled to vaccinate at high rates, indicating potential accessibility issues for the elderly. This study finds that improving basic and health infrastructure, focusing on accessibility in the last mile, particularly for the elderly, and fostering global partnerships can improve logistical operations of such a scale. Such structural impediments and inequities in global health care must be addressed in preparation for future global public health crises.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2023

Measuring sampling plan utility in post-marketing surveillance of medical products

Ensuring product quality is critical to combating the global challenge of substandard and falsified medical products. Post-marketing surveillance is a central quality-assurance activity in which products from consumer-facing locations are collected and tested. Regulators in low-resource settings use post-marketing surveillance to evaluate product quality across locations and determine corrective actions. Part of post-marketing surveillance is developing a sampling plan, which specifies where to test and the number of tests to conduct at a location. With limited resources, it is important to base decisions on the utility of the samples tested. We propose a Bayesian approach to generate a comprehensive utility metric for sampling plans. This sampling plan utility integrates regulatory risk assessments with prior testing data, available supply-chain information, and valuations of regulatory objectives. We develop an efficient method for calculating sampling plan utility. We illustrate the value of the utility metric with a case study based on de-identified post-marketing surveillance data from a low-resource setting.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2022

Inferring sources of substandard and falsified products in pharmaceutical supply chains

Substandard and falsified pharmaceuticals, prevalent in low- and middle-income countries, substantially increase levels of morbidity, mortality and drug resistance. Regulatory agencies combat this problem using post-market surveillance by collecting and testing samples where consumers purchase products. Existing analysis tools for post-market surveillance data focus attention on the locations of positive samples. This paper looks to expand such analysis through underutilized supply-chain information to provide inference on sources of substandard and falsified products. We first establish the presence of unidentifiability issues when integrating this supply-chain information with surveillance data. We then develop a Bayesian methodology for evaluating substandard and falsified sources that extracts utility from supply-chain information and mitigates unidentifiability while accounting for multiple sources of uncertainty. Using de-identified surveillance data, we show the proposed methodology to be effective in providing valuable inference.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2020

A Bounded Formulation for The School Bus Scheduling Problem

This paper proposes a new formulation for the school bus scheduling problem (SBSP) which optimizes school start times and bus operation times to minimize transportation cost. Our goal is to minimize the number of buses to serve all bus routes such that each route arrives in a time window before school starts. We present a new time-indexed integer linear programming (ILP) formulation for this problem. Based on a strengthened version of the linear relaxation of the ILP, we develop a dependent randomized rounding algorithm that yields near-optimal solutions for large-scale problem instances. We also generalize our methodologies to solve a robust version of the SBSP.

math.OC↗

arXiv2019

Generalizing the Covering Path Problem on a Grid

We study the covering path problem on a grid of R^{2}. We generalize earlier results on a rectangular grid and prove that the covering path cost can be bounded by the area and perimeter of the grid. We provide (2+ε) and (1+ε)-approximations for the problem on a general grid and on a convex grid, respectively.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2019

The Covering Path Problem on a Grid

This paper introduces the covering path problem on a grid (CPPG) which finds the cost-minimizing path connecting a subset of points in a grid such that each point that needs to be covered is within a predetermined distance of a point from the chosen subset. We leverage the geometric properties of the grid graph which captures the road network structure in many transportation problems, including our motivating setting of school bus routing. As defined in this paper, the CPPG is a bi-objective optimization problem comprised of one cost term related to path length and one cost term related to stop count. We develop a trade-off constraint which quantifies the trade-off between path length and stop count and provides a lower bound for the bi-objective optimization problem. We introduce simple construction techniques to provide feasible paths that match the lower bound within a constant factor. Importantly, this solution approach uses transformations of the general CPPG to either a discrete CPPG or continuous CPPG based on the value of the coverage radius. For both the discrete and continuous versions, we provide fast constant-factor approximations, thus solving the general CPPG.

math.OC↗

arXiv2019

Incorporating Equity into the School Bus Scheduling Problem

We consider the school bus scheduling problem (SBSP) which simultaneously determines school bell times and route schedules. Often, the goal of the SBSP is to minimize the number of buses required by a school district. We extend a time-indexed integer programming model to incorporate additional considerations related to equity and efficiency. We seek to equitably reduce the disutilities associated with changing school start times via a minimax model, then propose a lexicographic minimax approach to improve minimax solutions. We apply our models to randomized instances based on a moderately-sized public school district to show the impact of incorporating equity.

math.OC↗

arXiv2017

Advancements in Continuum Approximation Models for Logistics and Transportation Systems: 1996 - 2016

Continuum Approximation (CA) is an efficient and parsimonious technique for modeling complex logistics problems. In this paper,we review recent studies that develop CA models for transportation, distribution and logistics problems with the aim of synthesizing recent advancements and identifying current research gaps. This survey focuses on important principles and key results from CA models. In particular, we consider how these studies fill the gaps identified by the most recent literature reviews in this field. We observe that CA models are used in a wider range of applications, especially in the areas of facility location and integrated supply chain management. Most studies use CA as an alternative to exact solution approaches; however, CA can also be used in combination with exact approaches. We also conclude with promising areas of future work.

math.OC↗

arXiv2015

Stratified Patient Appointment Scheduling for Community-based Chronic Disease Management Programs

Disease management programs have emerged as a cost-effective approach to treat chronic diseases. Appointment adherence is critical to the success of such programs; missed appointment are costly, resulting in reduced resource utilization and worsening of patients' health states. The time of an appointment is one of the factors that impacts adherence. We investigate the benefits, in terms of improved adherence, of incorporating patients' time-of-day preferences during appointment schedule creation and, thus, ultimately, on population health outcomes. Through an extensive computational study, we demonstrate, more generally, the usefulness of patient stratification in appointment scheduling in the environment that motivates our research, an asthma management program offered in Chicago. We find that capturing patient characteristics in appointment scheduling, especially their time preferences, leads to substantial improvements in community health outcomes. We also identify settings in which simple, easy-to-use policies can produce schedules that are comparable in quality to those obtained with an optimization-based approach.

math.OC↗