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Appointment games with unobservable and observable schedules

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Abstract

Appointment scheduling assigns start times in a session or consultation block to a set of tasks that share a common resource. For a generic repeated appointment scheduling problem, we study the trade-off between waiting for an appointment and waiting at the appointed time. Assuming that being scheduled later during a session implies that one has to wait longer for service (on average), it is often beneficial to choose a consultation block further away. We study this trade-off both when the patients have no information on how many patients are already scheduled in future consultation blocks and when they can observe the future block schedules. By some numerical examples, we find that in both cases the rational choice considerably changes between consecutive appointment blocks, patients favouring later blocks when the next appointment block starts in the near future. We also compare the rational choice with the socially optimal schedule and find that socially optimal scheduling can significantly reduce the waiting cost.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Industrial Systems Engineering and Product Design, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

    Matthias Deceuninck, Stijn De Vuyst & Dieter Claeys

  2. Industrial Systems Engineering (ISyE), Flanders Make, Kortrijk, Belgium

    Stijn De Vuyst & Dieter Claeys

  3. Department of Telecommunications and Information Processing, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

    Dieter Fiems

Authors
  1. Matthias Deceuninck
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  2. Stijn De Vuyst
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  3. Dieter Claeys
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  4. Dieter Fiems
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Correspondence to Dieter Fiems.

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Deceuninck, M., De Vuyst, S., Claeys, D. et al. Appointment games with unobservable and observable schedules. Ann Oper Res 307, 93–110 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-021-04168-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-021-04168-z

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