학술논문

Fairness over time in dynamic resource allocation with an application in healthcare.
Document Type
Article
Source
Mathematical Programming. Jan2024, Vol. 203 Issue 1/2, p285-318. 34p.
Subject
*COLUMN generation (Algorithms)
*RESOURCE allocation
*FAIRNESS
*AMBULANCES
*STATISTICAL decision making
*MATHEMATICAL programming
Language
ISSN
0025-5610
Abstract
Decision making problems are typically concerned with maximizing efficiency. In contrast, we address problems where there are multiple stakeholders and a centralized decision maker who is obliged to decide in a fair manner. Different decisions give different utility to each stakeholder. In cases where these decisions are made repeatedly, we provide efficient mathematical programming formulations to identify both the maximum fairness possible and the decisions that improve fairness over time, for reasonable metrics of fairness. We apply this framework to the problem of ambulance allocation, where decisions in consecutive rounds are constrained. With this additional complexity, we prove structural results on identifying fair feasible allocation policies and provide a hybrid algorithm with column generation and constraint programming-based solution techniques for this class of problems. Computational experiments show that our method can solve these problems orders of magnitude faster than a naive approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]