Article ID: | iaor2009458 |
Country: | United Kingdom |
Volume: | 36 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 33 |
End Page Number: | 43 |
Publication Date: | Feb 2008 |
Journal: | OMEGA |
Authors: | Wilson James R., Goldsman David, Alexopoulos Christos, Fontanesi John, Kopald David |
Keywords: | queues: applications, scheduling, simulation: applications, optimization |
We develop improved methods for modeling and simulating the streams of patients arriving at a community clinic. In previous practice, random (unscheduled) patient arrivals were often assumed to follow an ordinary Poisson process (so the corresponding patient interarrival times were randomly sampled from an exponential distribution); and for scheduled arrivals, each patient's tardiness (i.e., the deviation from the scheduled appointment time) was often assumed to be randomly sampled from a normal distribution.