Appointment scheduling for routine and urgent patients under deterministic service time

Abstract

In this paper, we derive solution approaches for outpatient appointment schedule problem with routine and urgent patients under deterministic service time considering no-show probability to minimize a weighted sum of average waiting time, idle time and overtime. An exact method is designed to find an optimal solution. Numerical experiments are conducted to illustrate what's the impact of the critical factors on service efficiency of the clinic in practice, which reveals that lower no-show probability will benefit both patients and clinics.