A Comparison of Traditional and Open-Access Policies for Appointment Scheduling
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Appointment Scheduling with Discrete Random Durations
Mathematics of Operations Research
Adaptive Appointment Systems with Patient Preferences
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Fast evaluation of appointment schedules for outpatients in health care
ASMTA'11 Proceedings of the 18th international conference on Analytical and stochastic modeling techniques and applications
Appointment Scheduling Under Patient No-Shows and Service Interruptions
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Dynamic Appointment Scheduling of a Stochastic Server with Uncertain Demand
INFORMS Journal on Computing
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Queueing systems with scheduled arrivals, i.e., appointment systems, are typical for frontal service systems, e.g., health clinics. An aspect of customer behavior that influences the overall efficiency of such systems is the phenomenon of no-shows. The consequences of no-shows cannot be underestimated; e.g., British surveys reveal that in the United Kingdom alone more than 12 million general practitioner (GP) appointments are missed every year, costing the British health service an estimated ₤250 million annually. In this study we answer the following key questions: How should the schedule be computed when there are no-shows? Is it sufficiently accurate to use a schedule designed for the same expected number of customers without no-shows? How important is it to invest in efforts that reduce no-shows---i.e., given that we apply a schedule that takes no-shows into consideration, is the existence of no-shows still costly to the server and customers?