Queueing systems with service interruptions
Operations Research
Single machine flow-time scheduling with a single breakdown
Acta Informatica
Computers and Operations Research
WSC '92 Proceedings of the 24th conference on Winter simulation
Scheduling arrivals to a queue
Computers and Operations Research
Releasing N jobs to an unreliable machine
Computers and Industrial Engineering
Optimally scheduling N customer arrival times for a single-server system
Computers and Operations Research
Emergency department simulation and determination of optimal attending physician staffing schedules
Proceedings of the 31st conference on Winter simulation: Simulation---a bridge to the future - Volume 2
A single server queue with service interruptions
Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications
Algorithms for partial fraction decomposition and rational function integration
SYMSAC '71 Proceedings of the second ACM symposium on Symbolic and algebraic manipulation
Managing Patient Service in a Diagnostic Medical Facility
Operations Research
Scheduling Arrivals to Queues: A Single-Server Model with No-Shows
Management Science
Reducing Delays for Medical Appointments: A Queueing Approach
Operations Research
Revenue Management for a Primary-Care Clinic in the Presence of Patient Choice
Operations Research
Dynamic Scheduling of Outpatient Appointments Under Patient No-Shows and Cancellations
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Hi-index | 0.00 |
We consider an appointment-based service system (e.g., an outpatient clinic) for which appointments need to be scheduled before the service session starts. Patients with scheduled appointments may or may not show up for their appointments. The service of scheduled patients can be interrupted by emergency requests that have a higher priority. We develop a framework that can be utilized in determining the optimal appointment policies under different assumptions regarding rewards, costs, and decision variables. We propose two methods to evaluate the objective function for a given appointment schedule. We specifically consider two different formulations, both of which aim to balance the trade-off between the patient waiting times and server utilization and carry out a numerical study to provide insights into optimal policies. We find that policies that ignore interruptions perform quite badly, especially when the number of appointments to be scheduled is also a decision variable. We also find that policies that require equally spaced appointments perform reasonably well when the interruption rate is constant. However, their performance worsens significantly when the interruption rate is time dependent.