Optimal outpatient appointment scheduling with emergency arrivals and general service times
نویسندگان
چکیده
In this paper we study the problem of deciding at what times to schedule patients when there are emergency arrivals following a non-stationary Poisson process. The service times can be any given distribution. The objective function consists of a weighted sum of the waiting times, idle time and tardiness. We prove that this objective function is multimodular, and then use a local search algorithm which in that case is guaranteed to find the optimal solution. Numerical examples show that this method gives considerable improvements over the standard even-spaced schedule, and that the schedules for different service time distributions can look
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