| Article ID: | iaor20083213 |
| Country: | Netherlands |
| Volume: | 10 |
| Issue: | 3 |
| Start Page Number: | 217 |
| End Page Number: | 229 |
| Publication Date: | Sep 2007 |
| Journal: | Health Care Management Science |
| Authors: | Koole Ger, Kaandorp Guido C. |
| Keywords: | scheduling, heuristics: local search |
In this paper optimal outpatient appointment scheduling is studied. A local search procedure is derived that converges to the optimal schedule with a weighted average of expected waiting times of patients, idle time of the doctor and tardiness (lateness) as objective. No-shows are allowed to happen. For certain combinations of parameters the well-known Bailey–Welch rule is found to be the optimal appointment schedule.