Sequential appointment scheduling problem with general patient choice

Effective appointment scheduling system is very important to the efficiency of the clinic and the satisfaction of the patients. In practice, the clinic scheduler usually assigns the patients to an available slot before the call terminates and the appointment time can´t be adjusted any more. In this paper, a sequential appointment scheduling method is proposed to balance the benefits of clinic and patients´ satisfaction considering patient choice. It determines the optimal booking number of patients and optimal scheduling time for each patient to maximize the profit of the outpatient clinic over a session-day. The profit considered in this paper is the total revenue of all arriving patients minus the cost of waiting time, idle time and overtime, which not only considers the rewards from booking decision, but also precisely formulates the charge on service process depending on scheduling. A general patient choice behavior is incorporated into the model as well. A myopic scheduling algorithm is developed to optimally solve the sequential appointment scheduling problem with patient preference. The influence of the choice set is proved and the condition of the existence of optimal solution is provided as well. The results show that the objective function evolution is unimodal and the allowance of patient choice can increase the number of patients seen in a day, but lower down the expected profit on account of less flexibility.