题目: Appointment Scheduling of Outpatient Clinical Services under Uncertain Patient Flows

主讲人：Yang Yang （美国普渡大学）

时间：2024年12月20日（周五）10:00-11:30

地点：600全讯白菜网址大全216

 

摘要: 

We study the problem of appointment scheduling for outpatient clinical services. The patient arrival, appointment cancellation, and appointment attendance are all random, leading to highly variable patient flows in the service system. Analyzing the dynamic decisions is challenging because of the need for tracking the confirmed appointments within the scheduling window. For planning with a long horizon, we show that a probabilistic allocation policy can be efficiently computed by optimizing a closed-form function. The resulting long-term profit approaches the optimal profit asymptotically for scalable systems. For a limited planning horizon, we propose a sequential assignment process implemented with a pre-determined scheduling diagram. We then characterize conditions under which a scheduling diagram policy is optimal. An improvement from a probabilistic allocation policy or a same-day scheduling policy results in a scheduling diagram policy, and the scheduling diagram policy is optimal for two-day schedules. The computation of the proposed scheduling diagrams, through ranking the margins of scalar functions, is simple. An extensive simulation analysis suggests that the system can be efficiently managed through a combination of a two-day policy and an improved probabilistic policy with the former applied to a short scheduling window and the latter to a long scheduling window.

主讲人简介: 

Yang Yang is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. School of Business, Purdue University. She received her bachelor’s degree in Statistics from University of Science and Technology of China and Ph.D. in Management Sciences from the City University of Hong Kong. Her research mainly focuses on dynamic decision-making and data-integrated analytics in service operations management.