Spring 2015 Seminar Series

DATE: 4/16/15
LOCATION: E51-395
TIME: 4:15pm
Reception immediately following

SPEAKER:
Jan Van Mieghem

TITLE
Collaboration and Multi-Tasking in Human Networks

ABSTRACT
I will discuss my recent research stream that focuses on a specific notion of how people (professionals) collaborate and its implications on throughput, capacity and service.  Itai Gurvich and I consider simultaneous collaboration by which we mean that multiple resources need to be present simultaneously to execute a task.  The second characteristic of the environment we study is multi-tasking: the resources also execute other tasks. And the third characteristic concerns the human element: in contrast to computers that can time-share their bandwidth, human resources cannot split themselves and can only perform one task at any point in time. We have three research pieces in this environment that I will report on (yet focus on two time permitting): one is completed and studies when the conventional approach of bottleneck capacity equates to the network capacity  (see link below), the other two are ongoing: one is a theory piece on the trade-off between capacity loss and service considerations; the other an empirical study of capacity loss among collaborating physicians. Collaboration and Multitasking in Networks: Architectures, Bottlenecks and Capacity. With Itai Gurvich. July 9, 2014. Manufacturing & Service Operations Management. Forthcoming.