Open Positions

At the moment, there are two open PhD positions. For general information, contact professor R.J.Boucherie.

In urban studies, traffic links between roads are a severe source of air contamination, in particular with fine dust. The increasing quality of remote sensing images, has emphasized the need for automatic techniques. The project aims at combining information from different sources: a series of images at various spatial scales, traffic network data and plume models to predict the behavior of contaminated air in relation with prevailing weather conditions. Possibilities to steer traffic using traffic tax will be explored. Relevant quantitative information will be communicated to inform the government at different levels. The study will focus on two industrial and urban areas, one in India and one in the Netherlands. For further information, contact professor R.J.Boucherie.

In the healthcare sector there is a trend towards specialization of healthcare providers. As a consequence, the patient needs medical aid from a multitude of specialized healthcare providers. However, in today’s practice these specialized services are often not synchronized, which leads to excessively long waiting lists in healthcare. To cope with this, the challenge is to realize efficient health pathways over the whole healthcare chain.

The services offered by the specialized healthcare providers (ambulance services, intensive care, revalidation services, nursery services) are not well aligned. As a consequence, the patient often has to wait excessively long for medical treatment. Moreover, the inefficiency in the healthcare chain leads to dramatic increase of the cost of healthcare, with evident societal and economic implications.

The excessively long waiting lists in healthcare are caused to a large extent by the inherent uncertainty in patient flows and handling times of medical aid. The methods that are currently used in the sector are often based on “average behavior”, and consequently, the essence of capacity problems which results from the interaction between healthcare pathways is not captured. The solution to the waiting-time problems lies in the development of efficient healthcare pathways over the whole healthcare chain, explicitly taking into account the inherent uncertainty that is omnipresent in the system. As a result, the waiting times for medical aid will be strongly decreased, while the costs of healthcare are affordable.

The development of new capacity and planning methods to align the individual planning over the multitude of specialized healthcare providers in the healthcare chain that explicitly include the impact of the inherent uncertainty in the patient flows and handling times of medical aid. These methods fall within the domain of stochastic networks, in particular in the theories of decision making under uncertainty, and networks of queues. An innovative from a mathematical point-of-view is the study of the interaction between patients paths, and the development and implementation of large-scale planning and approximation techniques that take into account the complex mix of mutually dependent health pathways. Especially these approximation techniques are of eminent importance for the adequate analysis and optimization of health pathways.

As a consequence of the ageing population, the number of available medical staff decreases, while the requests for health care increases. This will result in strongly increasing waiting times for the patient-in-need, and hence into a degradation of the quality of healthcare. By properly balancing demand and supply, high-quality healthcare remains available to our population in The Netherlands.

The realization of efficient health pathways will lead to dramatic cost savings by avoid the need for compensating for inefficiency in the expensive healthcare chain. This will allow us to offer high quality healthcare at affordable cost. In addition, the enhance efficiency will reduce the waiting list problem, so that more diverse capacity becomes available.

Providers of specialized healthcare do not seem to be convinced of the urgency of the need for efficient pathways over a multitude of care providers, in part since the effects of delay in the health care chain is not transparent to them. Moreover, funds and subsidies for improvement are often earmarked to improve on direct medical treatment. This leads to a deadlock situation. COMICT can break this deadlock by making clear the possible improvements for the sector as a whole, and by bringing together the multitude of specialized care providers over the whole chain to realize the required efficiency improvement in the healthcare sector. For further information, contact professor R.J.Boucherie.

For general information on PhD-positions at the University of Twente, see this page.