Operations Research for Health Care in Red Zone

The book contains selected contributions from the 48th Annual Meeting of the EURO Working Group on Operational Research Applied to Health Services (ORAHS 2022) held in Bergamo, Italy, July 2022.

ORAHS 2022 provided a network for researchers involved in the application of systematic and quantitative analyses to support planning and management in the health services sector, with the ultimate goal of pursuing good health and well-being.
It was the ORAHS in the red zone, focused on the organization and reaction of health systems in the face of emergency situations such as the COVID pandemic.
The questions addressed were, for example, how can hospitals and public authorities react to extreme scenarios by reorganizing their resources? How and to what extent do local health systems integrate hospitals to deal with a pandemic? How can Decision Support Systems for diagnosis and treatment help when battling a new virus for the first time?
Contributions included a variety of methodological viewpoints (optimization, simulation, data analysis, predictive models, decision science, mathematical programming, machine learning, ...) and health services applications (hospital management, therapy calibration, analysis of statistical and epidemiological data, minimization of logistics costs, ...).

This work strongly contributes to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Programme.

Roberto Aringhieri is an associate professor of Operations Research at the University of Turin, Italy. He holds a M.S. in Computer Science and a Ph.D. in Mathematics for Economic Decisions and Operations Research from the University of Pisa. His main research interest focuses on quantitative methods applied to healthcare management. He is the co-chair of the EURO Working Group on Operational Research Applied to Health Services. He also serves as an associate editor for Operations Research for Healthcare.

Ettore Lanzarone is a tenure-track associate professor at University of Bergamo. He is also a research collaborator at the Institute for Applied Mathematics and Information Technology “E. Magenes” (IMATI) of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR), where he worked as a researcher from 2011 to 2020. He is a member of the Centre Interuniversitaire de Recherche sur les Reseaux d’Entreprise, la Logistique et le Transport (CIRRELT), Montréal and Quebec City, Canada. He obtained his Ph.D. in Bioengineering and his master’s degree in biomedical engineering cum laude in 2008 and 2004, respectively, at the Politecnico di Milano. His research activities focus on bioengineering, optimization and operations research, and stochastic models.

Francesca Maggioni is an associate professor of Operations Research at the University of Bergamo, Italy. She holds a M.S. in Mathematics from Catholic University with laude and a Ph.D. in Pure and Applied Mathematics from the University of Milano Bicocca. Her main research interests are on optimization under uncertainty and applications in transportation and logistics. She is the chair of the EURO Working Group on Stochastic Optimization (EWGSO), the co-chair of the Stochastic Programming section of the Italian Operations Research Society (AIRO), and the secretary of the Stochastic Programming Society (SPS). She also serves as an associate editor for the journals: EURO Journal on Computational Optimization, Computational Management Science, Networks and TOP, An Official Journal of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research.

Giovanni Righini is a full professor of operations research at the University of Milan, Italy. He holds a M.S. in Electronic Engineering and a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the Technical University of Milan. His main research interest is in mathematical programming algorithms for combinatorial optimization problems. He is a member of the healthcare section of the Italian Operations Research Society (AIRO).

Maria Teresa Vespucci is an associate professor of Operations Research at the University of Bergamo, Italy. She holds a Ph.D. in Numerical Optimization from the University of Hertfordshire, UK. Her main research interest is in mathematical models for operational and investment problems in energy and industry.

Melanie Reuter-Oppermann is an Assistant Professor for Operations Research in Healthcare at the University of Twente. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. She holds a diploma in Economathematics from the Technical University Kaiserslautern, Germany, and a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering and Management with a focus on operations research for emergency medical services from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. She is a co-chair of the EURO Working Group on Operational Research Applied to Health Services (ORAHS). In 2021, she was awarded the Julius von Haast Fellowship from the Royal Society of New Zealand. Her main research interest is in operations research, analytics, artificial intelligence, and design science for healthcare services and logistics.