EURO 2024 Copenhagen
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1747. Convexity in Transient Queues with Appointment-driven Arrivals and Implications on Optimal Appointment Scheduling

Invited abstract in session TB-15: Appointment planning, stream OR in Health Services (ORAHS).

Tuesday, 10:30-12:00
Room: 18 (building: 116)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Alex Kuiper
Business Analytics, University of Amsterdam
2. Christos Zacharias
Management Science, University of Miami

Abstract

The inter-day (which day?) and intra-day (when?) appointment scheduling problems are often studied in isolation, whereas in reality, they are intertwined. If the waiting list becomes too large (small), one would want to extend (reduce) the appointment book, but such decisions directly impact the optimality of the schedule. Using a continuous intra-day scheduling paradigm, these problems are connected in a dynamic environment. Extending convexity properties of the appointment scheduling problem renders the corresponding dynamic program amenable to building upon recent advances in literature.

Since the optimal solution is not tractable, two intra-day scheduling paradigms are introduced: a theoretical approach (based on re-optimization) and a heuristic, which is based on schedules that exhibit so-called sequential refinability. Together, they bound the optimal policy for the dynamic inter/intra-scheduling problem. At the same time, their small difference underscores the potential of using this heuristic in healthcare practice.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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