Dynamic scheduling with cancellations: an application to chemotherapy appointment booking

We study a dynamic scheduling problem that has the feature of due dates and time windows. This problem arises in chemotherapy scheduling where patients from different types have specific target dates along with time windows for appointment. We consider cancellation of appointments. The problem is modeled as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and approximately solved using a direct-search based approximate dynamic programming (ADP) tehnique. We compare the performance of the ADP technique against the myopic policy under diverse scenarios. Our computational results reveal that the ADP technique outperforms the myopic policy on majority of problem sets we generated.