MASS-CUSTOMIZED OUTPATIENT APPOINTMENT RULE GENERATOR
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.23055/ijietap.2019.26.2.4526Keywords:
Appointment rule, Appointment scheduling, Outpatient services, Simulation optimizationAbstract
This study claims that if a mass-customized appointment rule is developed for each individual outpatient doctor, it could improve the performance and service quality of outpatient clinics. A simulation-based optimization algorithm is proposed for mass-customized appointment rule generation. Various environmental factors, such as preferred appointment intervals, new and return patients, no-shows, walk-in patients, stochastic consultation times, and patient unpunctuality, are considered to generate implementable and practical rules. The simulation-based optimization algorithm uses several well-known appointment rules as initial solutions, evaluates the effectiveness of rules by simulation that considers practical environmental factors, improves rules using a neighborhood search, and reports the best rule. The algorithm generates a variable-block-size/fixed-interval rule consisting of the numbers of new and return patients in each appointment interval. Computational experiments show that the proposed algorithm can generate effective appointment rules with user-provided preferred appointment interval considering the various environmental factors.
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