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A novel and efficient real-time sequencing strategy for appointment scheduling with unpunctual patients

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Abstract

No-shows and non-punctual appointments have always been uncertain factors faced by managers of service-oriented enterprises and institutions, which usually lead to a low utilization rate of resources and a rapid decline in service satisfaction. Taking clinics as an example, this paper proposes a novel and efficient real-time sequencing strategy to minimize the cost associated with patient waiting time, provider idle time and overtime considering no-shows and unpunctuality. Four types of patient waiting time are considered for the first time, based on which the developed real-time sequencing strategy is used for scheduling the waiting patients when the provider becomes idle. Then, a biased random-key genetic algorithm is adopted to determine the number of patients on appointment slots and the length of each appointment slot. Extensive computational experiments show that the derived real-time sequencing strategy achieves a significant cost reduction compared with the famous FCFS (first come first served) and the state-of-art LAR (the larger of appointment time and real arrival time) rules.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Business School, Hunan University, Changsha, 410082, People’s Republic of China

    Chao Li, Zhi Yang & Feng Wang

  2. School of Management, Shanghai University, Shanghai, 200444, People’s Republic of China

    Fajun Yang

  3. School of Mathematics and Computer Science, Hagen University, 58093, Hagen, Germany

    Fajun Yang

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  1. Chao Li
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  2. Zhi Yang
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  3. Fajun Yang
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  4. Feng Wang
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Correspondence to Fajun Yang.

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Li, C., Yang, Z., Yang, F. et al. A novel and efficient real-time sequencing strategy for appointment scheduling with unpunctual patients. J Sched 27, 135–149 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10951-023-00802-9

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