We consider an appointment system where the patients have preferences about the appointment days. A patient may be scheduled on one of the days that is acceptable to her, or be denied appointment. The patient may or may not show up at the appointed time. The net cost is a convex function of the actual number of patients served on a given day. We study the optimal scheduling policy that minimizes the long-run average cost and study its structural properties. We advocate an index policy, which is easy to implement, performs well in comparison with other heuristic policies, and is close to the optimal policy.
['Yu Zhang', 'Vidyadhar G. Kulkarni']
Two-day appointment scheduling with patient preferences and geometric arrivals