52 ISE Magazine | www.iise.org/ISEmagazine

Inside IISE Journals

research

Tackling the next level of uncertainty

in medical decision-making

In the words of Sir William Osler, the Father of Modern

Medicine: “Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art

of probability.” Medical decision-making is a process that

money and can have side effects.

possible treatments to inform a strategy of whether and

when to treat that makes the most sense for the patient.

But what should a modeler do when there are multiple,

different treatment recommendations, leading to ambiguity

in how the doctor should proceed to manage the patient’s

condition.

recommends treatment strate-

gies with lower expected re-

gret compared to those based

on a single model alone, as

is typically done in practice.

The study suggests that in-

corporating multiple plausible

This month we highlight two articles in IISE Transactions. The first article contemplates what a medical decision-

maker should do when there are multiple, conflicting estimates of a patient’s risk. The authors propose a multimodel

Markov decision process method to mitigate the ambiguity in medical treatments that could be caused by the

conflicting estimates. The authors show a positive impact of the new approach, in terms of lower expected regret,

in a case study of cardiovascular disease treatment. The second article looks into the issue of how to efficiently

operate and coordinate thousands of overhead hoist transporters in a semiconductor fabrication. For this, the

authors propose a cooperative zone-based rebalancing algorithm, which is to zone the semiconductor fabrication

head hoist transporters automatically transport a bundle of

The authors of a paper on cooperative zone-based rebalancing

of idle overhead hoist transportation stand in the Advanced

Manufacturing Intelligence Innovation Center at KAIST.

Pictured from left are professor Jinkyoo Park and doctoral

student Kyuree Ahn.

and long-term crises

54 ISE Magazine | www.iise.org/ISEmagazine

transporters in a FAB is similar to the operation of robot taxis

in a city; a taxi should be optimally allocated to a customer

while considering the traffic conditions of the road network

and the geographical distributions of taxis and customers to

maximize the service rate. As the semiconductor FAB become

imperative to operate transporters in a FAB intelligently to

increase the productivity of automatic material handling.

Overhead Hoist Transportations Using Multi-Agent Rein-

rithm to allocate idle overhead hoist transporters in a semicon-

centric state representation. The graph representation module

uses them to determine the optimum rebalancing action.

SYNUS Tech.

CONTACT: Jinkyoo Park; Jinkyoo.park@kaist.ac.kr; +82 (42) 350-3133;

Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering, Korean Advanced Insti-

tute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, South Korea

Yu Ding is the Mike and Sugar Barnes Professor of Industrial

and Systems Engineering at Texas A&M University and Associ-

ate Director for Research Engagement at the Texas A&M Institute

a fellow of IISE.