Appointment scheduling algorithm considering routine and urgent patients

作者：

Highlights：

• We derive solutions for appointment scheduling with routine and urgent patients with no-show.

• For deterministic service time, an exact method is proposed to find the optimal schedule.

• For exponentially service time, a property is presented to show the objective is not multimodular.

• A heuristic algorithm based on shifting policies is developed to give an upper bound.

• Experiments are conducted to illustrate how the critical factors affect service efficiency.

摘要

•We derive solutions for appointment scheduling with routine and urgent patients with no-show.•For deterministic service time, an exact method is proposed to find the optimal schedule.•For exponentially service time, a property is presented to show the objective is not multimodular.•A heuristic algorithm based on shifting policies is developed to give an upper bound.•Experiments are conducted to illustrate how the critical factors affect service efficiency.

论文关键词：Appointment scheduling system,Health care operation management,Heuristics,Multimodularity,Two types of patients

论文评审过程：Available online 26 January 2014.

论文官网地址：https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2014.01.014