[Scheduling seminar] Rachel R. Chen (UC Davis) | November 12 | Outpatient Appointment Scheduling with Waiting Time Limits

Dear scheduling researcher,

We are delighted to announce the talk given by Rachel R. Chen (UC 
Davis). The title is "Outpatient Appointment Scheduling with Waiting 
Time Limits". The seminar will take place on Zoom on Wednesday, November 
12 at 14:00 UTC.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/98020327183?pwd=51usye8bYlWTWomIA9ZVVqiiwmj2ec.1
Meeting ID: 980 2032 7183
Passcode: 076268

You can follow the seminar online or offline on our Youtube channel as 
well:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUoCNnaAfw5NAntItILFn4A

The abstract follows.
This paper studies outpatient appointment scheduling with waiting time 
limits, in the presence of uncertain service times, patient no-shows and 
unpunctual arrivals. To tackle the problem of excessively long waiting 
times, policymakers may impose a waiting time limit. The introduction of 
waiting time limits increases the complexity of model formulation by 
significantly increasing the number of problem scenarios. To address 
this challenge, we introduce the concept of virtual waiting time, 
representing the additional waiting time that a patient would have to 
incur to see the doctor beyond the imposed waiting time limit. Using 
this construct, we are able to unify the modeling of system dynamics of 
all different scenarios into one stochastic program. We develop a 
tailored integer L-shaped method to solve this model and test its 
effectiveness against two benchmarks. Specifically, the subproblem is a 
mixed integer nonlinear program with good properties, which allow us to 
deduce its optimal value without using optimization solver. We find that 
the presence of waiting time limits increases the job allowance between 
two adjacent patients, and the optimal schedule does not necessarily 
exhibit the well-known dome-shaped pattern. We also find that waiting 
time limits help reduce variation in patient waiting times across 
different positions in the schedule, thereby enhancing fairness in the 
schedule. Furthermore, our results indicate that in the presence of 
waiting time limits, the total cost of the system is minimized when 
patients tend to arrive slightly late on average. Finally, we find that 
when a social planner sets the limit, the clinic has incentives to 
misreport its true cost of serving each diverted patient, and an 
additional fine on top of the time limits helps improve social welfare.

The next talk in our series will be:
Hoogeveen, J.A. (Utrecht University) | November 26 | Planning shunting 
operations at railway hubs
For more details, please visit https://schedulingseminar.com/

With kind regards

Zdenek Hanzalek, Michael Pinedo and Guohua Wan

-- 
Zdenek Hanzalek
Industrial Informatics Department,
Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics,
Czech Technical University in Prague,
Jugoslavskych partyzanu 1580/3, 160 00 Prague 6, Czech Republic
https://rtime.ciirc.cvut.cz/~hanzalek/

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