Article ID: | iaor19992414 |
Country: | United Kingdom |
Volume: | 49 |
Issue: | 12 |
Start Page Number: | 1254 |
End Page Number: | 1259 |
Publication Date: | Dec 1998 |
Journal: | Journal of the Operational Research Society |
Authors: | Liu L., Liu X. |
Keywords: | simulation: applications |
Studies of appointment systems have to some extent led to a wide acceptance of individual or block appointment schemes in private practice and outpatient clinics. Most of the studies assume there is one punctual doctor in a clinic, which is often not the case in reality. Motivated by observations of actual clinic operations, we develop a block appointment system for clinic operations with multiple random arriving doctors. Through extensive simulation studies, we identify properties shared by the best appointment schedules. With these properties we can design a scheme based on simulation search that provides the optimal schedule for a given scheduling environment in an acceptable computation time. A simple (suboptimal) appointment rule is also proposed.