This course is concerned with improving processes and designing facilities for service businesses such as banks, health care organizations, telephone call centers, restaurants, and transportation providers. Major topics in the course include design of service processes, layout and location of service facilities, demand forecasting, demand management, employee scheduling, service quality management, and capacity planning.

This iteration of the course will focus on revenue management (RM) aspects of service systems. Broadly, RM seeks to determine how to efficiently sell a fixed supply of a variety of goods when the demand is heterogeneous and uncertain. This requires an understanding of customer choice behaviour, different pricing and allocation strategies, and the design of robust mechanisms for customer and seller interaction. This course will introduce students to (i) Fundamental models that capture the key dynamics of these problems and (ii) Algorithms that turn these models into actionable decisions. The broad usefulness of concepts covered will be demonstrated through several applications such as in airline reservation systems, retail, advertising, e-commerce as well as in hospital-resident matching and school-student assignments.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.