CLASSES

JHU CSSE

Classes in Systems

The Center for System Science and Engineering is based in the Johns Hopkins Department of Civil Engineering. Graduate students interested in pursuing the Systems focus area should express this intent in their application and be interested in working with one of the CSSE-affiliated faculty.

Part-time and online Master’s degrees and certificates in systems are also offered by Johns Hopkins Engineering for Professionals.

Our students learn to use modeling and simulation to study the performance of complex systems and calculate the effect of changes.

Recommended

CLASSES

DepartmentCourse numberCourse descriptionRecommended Instructor
Civil & Systems Engineering (CaSE)EN.560.601Applied Math for Engineers
Civil & Systems Engineering (CaSE)EN.560.618Probabilistic Methods in Civil Engineering and MechanicsM. Shields
Civil & Systems Engineering (CaSE)EN.560.445Advanced Structural Analysis
Civil & Systems Engineering (CaSE)EN.560.645Integer and Robust OptimizationGhobadi
Civil & Systems Engineering (CaSE)EN.560.650Operations ResearchGhobadi
Civil & Systems Engineering (CaSE)EN.560.653An Introduction to Network ModelingGardner
Civil & Systems Engineering (CaSE)EN.560.658Natural Disaster Risk Modeling
Civil & Systems Engineering (CaSE)EN.560.449/649Energy SystemsY. Dvorkin
Applied Math and Statistics (AMS)EN.553.672Graph Theory
Applied Math and Statistics (AMS)EN.553.665Introduction to ConvexityW. Cook/A. Basu
Applied Math and Statistics (AMS)EN.553.766Combinatorial Optimization
Applied Math and Statistics (AMS)EN.553.797Introduction to Control Theory and Optimal Control
Applied Math and Statistics (AMS)EN.553.761Nonlinear Optimization IA. Basu
Applied Math and Statistics (AMS)EN.553.762Nonlinear Optimization IIBasu
Applied Math and Statistics (AMS)EN.553.673Introduction to Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos
Applied Math and Statistics (AMS)EN.553.753Commodities and Commodity Markets
Applied Math and Statistics (AMS)EN. 553.792Matrix Analysis and Linear AlgebraD. Fishkind
Environmental Health and EngineeringEN.570.607Energy Policy and Planning Models
Environmental Health and EngineeringEN.570.608Uncertainty Modeling for Policy & Management Decision Making
Environmental Health and EngineeringEN.570.616Data Analytics in Environmental Health and Engineering
Environmental Health and EngineeringEN.570.695Environmental Health and Engineering Systems Design
Environmental Health and EngineeringEN.570.697Risk and Decision Analysis
Electrical and Computer EngineeringEN.520.629Networked Dynamical Systems
Electrical and Computer EngineeringEN.520.621Introduction To Nonlinear Systems
Electrical and Computer EngineeringEN.520.654Control Systems Design
Electrical and Computer EngineeringEN.520.601Introduction to Linear Systems Theory
Electrical and Computer EngineeringEN.520.621Introduction to Nonlinear Systems
EconomicsAS.180.601Consumer and Producer Theory
EconomicsAS.180.600General Equilibrium Theory
EconomicsAS.180.623Economics of Information
EconomicsAS.180.622Game Theory

Many outpatient facilities with expensive resources, such as infusion and imaging centers, experience surge in their patient arrival at times and are under-utilization at other times. This pattern results in patient safety concerns, patient and staff dissatisfaction, and limitation in growth, among others. Scheduling practices is found to be one of the main contributors to this problem.

We developed a real-time scheduling framework to address the problem, specifically for infusion clinics. The algorithm assumes no knowledge of future appointments and does not change past appointments. Operational constraints are taken into account, and the algorithm can offer multiple choices to patients.

We generalize this framework to a new scheduling model and analyze its performance through competitive ratio. The resource utilization of the real-time algorithm is compared with an optimal algorithm, which knows the entire future. It can be proved that the competitive ratio of the scheduling algorithm is between 3/2 and 5/3 of an optimal algorithm.

This work was performed with the MIT/MGH Collaboration.

In many healthcare services, care is provided continuously, however, the care providers, e.g., doctors and nurses, work in shifts that are discrete. Hence, hand-offs between care providers is inevitable. Hand-offs are generally thought to effect patient care, although it is often hard to quantify the effects due to reverse causal effects between patients’ duration of stay and the number of hand-off events. We use a natural randomized control experiment, induced by physicians’ schedules, in teaching general medicine teams. We employ statistical tools to show that between the two randomly assigned groups of patients, a subset who experiences hand-off experience a different length of stay compared to the other group.

This work was performed with the MIT/MGH Collaboration.

Primary care is an important piece in the healthcare system that affects the downstream medical care of patients heavily. There are specific challenges in primary care as healthcare shifts from fee-for-service to population health management and medical home, focuses on cost savings and integrates quality measures. We consider the primary care unit at a large academic center that is facing similar challenges. In this work we focus on the imbalance in workload, which is a growing regulatory burden and directly concerns any staff in primary care. It can result in missed opportunities to deliver better patient care or providing a good work-environment for the physicians and the staff. We consider the primary care unit at the large academic center and focus on their challenge in balancing staff time with quality of care through a redesign of their system. We employ optimization models to reschedule providers’ sessions to improve the patient flow, and through that, a more balanced work-level for the support staff. 

This work was performed with the MIT/MGH Collaboration.

Perioperative services are one of the vital components of hospitals and any disruption in their operations can leave a downstream effect in the rest of the hospital. A large body of evidence links inefficiencies in perioperative throughput with adverse clinical outcomes. A regular delay in the operating room (OR), may lead to overcrowding in post-surgical units, and consequently, more overnight patients in the hospital. Conversely, an underutilization of OR is not only a waste of an expensive and high-demand resource, but it also means that other services who have a demand are not able to utilize OR. This mismatch in demand and utilization may, in turn, lead to hold-ups in the OR and cause further downstream utilization. We investigate the utilization of operating rooms by each service. The null hypothesis of this work is that the predicted utilization of the OR, i.e., the current block schedule, matches completely with the actual utilization of the service. We test this hypothesis for different utilization definitions, including physical and operational utilization and reject the null hypothesis. We further analyze why a mismatch may exist and how to optimize the schedule to improve patient flow in the hospital.