Scheduling doctors' appointments: optimal and empirically-based heuristic policies

Consider the problem facing a doctor (or other service provider) who is setting patient appointment times in the presence of random service times. He or she must balance the patients' waiting times (if the appointments are scheduled too closely together) against the doctor's idle time (if the appointments are spaced too far apart). Although this problem is fairly intractable, this paper uses the structure of the optimal solution as the basis for a simple closed-form heuristic for setting appointment times. Over a wide test bed of problems, this heuristic is shown to perform on average within 2% (and generally within 0.5%) of the optimal policy.

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