Evaluation of appointment scheduling rules: a multi-performance measures approach

Abstract- Appointment scheduling rules are used to determine during which service session and at what time a customer is to receive service. Many different appointment scheduling rules have been devised and are being used in practice (e.g. in healthcare, legal services, administration and many other service and manu-facturing industries). Which appointment scheduling rule is best however, is still an open question. In order to answer this question, we develop an analytical model to assess the performance (w.r.t. customer waiting time, server idle time and server overtime) of appointment scheduling rules in a wide variety of settings. More specifically, the model takes into account: (1) customer unpunc-tuality; (2) no-shows; (3) service interruptions; (4) delay of the service process. In addition, no restriction are imposed on the dis-tributions used to capture the basic processes (i.e. the model is not limited to the use of exponential distributions). The model builds on matrix analytical methods and adopts an efficient algorithm (in terms of computational and memory requirements) to assess the performance of 314 appointment scheduling rules. Data envelop-ment analysis is used to compare the results of these appointment scheduling rules